A Jewish Chaplain in FranceLevinger, Lee J. (Lee Joseph)
Religion
A Jewish Chaplain in France
Levinger, Lee J. (Lee Joseph)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Jews
The Jewish boys went into the army to fight. That appears in their
proportion in the combatant branches of the American Expeditionary
Forces. While these branches--Infantry, Artillery, Cavalry, Engineers,
and Signal-Aviation--constituted 60 per cent. of the total, among the
114,000 records of Jewish soldiers in the hands of the War Records
Office the distribution among these combatant branches is fully 75 per
cent. The Infantry constituted 26.6 per cent. of the entire army, while
among the Jewish records it constituted 48 per cent. Artillery was 14
per cent. of the United States army, 8 per cent. of the Jewish total. In
cavalry the rate for the entire army was 2 per cent., for the Jews only
1.3 per cent. The engineer corps contributed 11 per cent. of the army
strength, and but 3 per cent. among the Jewish records. The signal and
aviation corps represented 7 per cent. of the United States total, and
15 per cent. of the Jewish total. The medical corps was 8 per cent. of
the army total, 9 per cent. of the Jewish total. Ordnance was 1.7 per
cent. of the army total, and 1.5 of the Jewish total. The quartermaster
corps was 6.2 per cent. of the army total and 5.9 per cent. of the
Jewish total.
The Army, Navy and Marine Corps altogether had nearly 10,000 Jews as
commissioned officers, and a really tremendous number of
non-commissioned officers. The Army records show more than a hundred
colonels and lieutenant colonels of Jewish faith, including such
distinguished officers as Colonel Abel Davis, whom I have already
mentioned in connection with his D. S. C. for heroism displayed on
October 9, 1918; Colonel Nathan Horowitz, of Boston, Mass. who spent 27
months in France in the heavy artillery; Colonel Samuel Frankenberger,
of Charleston, W. Va., who commanded the 78th Field Artillery; Colonel
Samuel J. Kopetzky, Medical Corps, of New York City, who commanded
Sanitary Train 396, in the A. E. F.; and Colonel Max Robert Wainer,
Quartermaster Corps, formerly of Delaware City, Del., who was awarded
the Distinguished Service Medal and appointed a Chevalier of the Legion
of Honor by the French government. These honors were but the climax to
a military career that began with enlistment as a private in 1905, and
promotion to the rank of Second Lieutenant in 1912. In the war every one
of the four battles in which he took part was the occasion of a further
promotion, so that he concluded the war as a Colonel. I have already
mentioned Colonel Wainer in another connection, as the first active
Jewish worker at Tours; as a matter of fact, he organized a Seder in his
own unit in 1918, where 500 men celebrated the Passover at the same time
that Chaplain Voorsanger was holding his Seder at St. Nazaire, and when
practically no other Jewish work was being conducted in the entire
overseas forces.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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