Wilfrid Israel

• 1. A Living Work of Art

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  Wilfrid Israel, an Anglo-German businessman, was the subject of a letter that Albert Einstein wrote in June 1943 to Israel's mother. Einstein knew she was gravely anxious about her son's fate. He told her he had never met a being so noble, so strong and so selfless, and he called Israel "a living work of art." Einstein still dared to hope that a miracle had spared him. Few people today know the name. Israel avoided public office and shunned publicity, and he wanted it that way. So what did a member of a wealthy Berlin department-store family do to move Einstein to write such words? Why is his name missing from so many accounts of a famous rescue that he helped set in motion? And how did a man so secretive manage to be so effective?

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• 2. An Elusive Cosmopolitan

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  His biographer Naomi Shepherd chose the phrase "almost hypnotic" for the influence Wilfrid Israel had over friends and colleagues. Others described him as "gentle and courageous" and "intensely secretive." Martin Buber called him "a man of great moral stature, dedicated to the service of others." Israel was born on the 11th of July 1899 into a wealthy Anglo-German Jewish family. On his English mother's side, he descended from the first Chief Rabbi of Britain. He attended the Mommsen-Gymnasium in Berlin-Charlottenburg. For a few months in 1911 he also studied at a school in Zuoz, Switzerland, called the Hochalpines Lyceum. After the First World War, he began to travel the world, including the Far East, where he developed a special interest in works of art. Contemporaries remembered him as an elegant, elusive figure. The novelist Christopher Isherwood used him as the model for Bernhard Landauer in the novel Goodbye to Berlin, published in 1939. Landauer appears again, prominently, in Isherwood's autobiographical Christopher and His Kind, published in 1976. Both books were later adapted into films. Israel was homosexual, but this was repressed and hidden, and it is the quiet thread that Isherwood's two books touch.

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• 3. Links Across Worlds

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  On the 27th of September 1931, Wilfrid Israel brought a guest named V. A. Sundaram to the summer home of his friend Albert Einstein in the German town of Caputh. Sundaram was a disciple and special envoy of Mahatma Gandhi. Israel had met him during a visit to India, which included a stop at Gandhi's home in 1925. During the visit, Einstein wrote a short letter to Gandhi, and Sundaram carried it back to him. Gandhi answered quickly with a letter of his own. Einstein and Gandhi never managed to meet as they had hoped. Even so, a direct line between the two men now existed, and it ran through Israel. Israel's circle also included Chaim Weizmann, later the first president of the state of Israel. As the global economic crisis broke, he helped bring the Habima Theatre to Mandatory Palestine. In 1932, Recha Freier appealed to him for money to seed her vision of Youth Aliyah, a plan to send young Jews to Palestine and save their lives. Israel provided the funds. The first group was twelve young people, sent to the Ben Shemen Youth Village in Palestine.

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• 4. Rescue From Inside Germany

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  The Nathan Israel Department Store in Berlin, owned by Wilfrid Israel's family, was one of the largest and oldest stores in pre-war Germany. From early in the Nazi period, he used the business as a base for engineering the release of prisoners from concentration camps. Many in the Nazi leadership held accounts at the store, and they were never charged. Israel also financed the emigration of his Jewish employees, roughly a third of the staff, by paying each two years' salary as they left Germany. Many of them ultimately reached America. The store itself was first vandalised, then taken over by the Nazis after a forced sale at a fraction of its worth. Philanthropy was only a small part of what he did. Israel was arrested and beaten, and the Gestapo followed him on journeys abroad.

  In small cafes, Hubert Pollack met his Gestapo contacts, always carrying a Mauser pistol in his pocket. Pollack was a Jewish statistician who worked under Israel at the Hilfsverein, the German Jewish welfare and emigration organization, and secretly under a British official. That official was Frank Foley, a British intelligence agent serving as Passport Officer at the British consulate in Berlin. The three formed a secretive mechanism, and each held a different key. Israel had money and direct links with sponsors abroad. Pollack had the Gestapo contacts, and he passed money across cafe tables. Foley issued the visas. When people pleaded for relatives held in the camps, Israel handed funds to Pollack, and Pollack obtained the documents. Foley then granted visas to people whom the other two vouched for as honest, their names blackened by the Gestapo. Israel and Pollack also warned Foley about agents planted in the lines of visa applicants. In the last years and months before Kristallnacht, the arrangement saved some 10,000 Jews.

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• 5. Three Weeks in November

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  British Foreign Office records, now held in the National Archives in London, describe Wilfrid Israel as the "chief representative of German Jewry." By the time of the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, he was director of the Hilfsverein. Most other official male heads of German Jewish organizations had been arrested. The three weeks that followed produced the Kindertransport, the rescue of 10,000 German Jewish children.

  On the 1st of November, Lord Herbert Samuel led an Anglo-Jewish deputation to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. He asked Britain to relax its strict immigration laws for children, and he received only sympathy and a non-committal answer. On the morning of the 8th, Israel called on George Ogilvie-Forbes, the British Chargé d'Affaires in Berlin, to express grave apprehension that reprisals would fall on Jews in Germany. On the 9th, he telephoned Chaim Weizmann in London, who immediately phoned the Foreign Office in considerable distress. The same day, Anglo-Jewish leaders asked Sir Michael Bruce to go to Berlin and meet Israel. On the 15th, Israel cabled the Council for German Jewry and proposed the immediate rescue of Jewish children and young people up to the age of seventeen. On the 17th, he returned to the British Embassy. He asked that Britain speed up emigration, especially for the ten to fifteen thousand Jews driven from their homes, who could wait in temporary camps.

  London needed proof that parents would really send their children away alone. No leading British Jew would risk visiting Germany. Here Israel's old Quaker connections, dating to refugee work after the First World War, paid off. A Quaker delegation headed by Bertha Bracey visited Germany, and Israel introduced them to the Frauenbund, the German Jewish women's organisation. Together they toured Jewish communities across the country. One Quaker, Ben Greene, hurried back to London with a clear message: German Jewry wanted help to emigrate, not relief on the spot.

  One London plea did fail. Israel, Paul Eppstein and Otto Hirsch had asked for wider help, and it was rejected. But another proposal succeeded: a transit camp in Britain for young men released from the camps. It saved eight thousand lives. On the 21st of November, Lord Samuel led a second deputation, with Lola Hahn Warburg and Bertha Bracey, to Home Secretary Samuel Hoare. Speaking in the House of Commons that evening and quoting Greene's evidence, Hoare announced that the government had agreed to admit refugee children.

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• 6. Whose Idea Was It

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  In newsreel footage of the children's departures and arrivals, every child is carefully dressed. Each carries a small knapsack and suitcase, with a tag around the neck giving a name. The film shows how meticulously German Jewish organizers had prepared, and how restrained the parents were. Yet many accounts of the Kindertransport leave those organizers out. Most of their leaders stayed in Germany to help fellow Jews even though they held visas and could have escaped. Israel's closest collaborators Eppstein, Hirsch and Hannah Karminski all perished. The gap has two causes. The records of the Jewish organizations were mostly destroyed, and the surviving eyewitness accounts come from the children, who knew nothing of the negotiations behind their rescue. The surviving paper trail includes copies of Israel's personal letters, deposited in a Wilfrid Israel archive at the Wiener Library in London.

  The evidence points to a plain conclusion about origins. The idea did not begin with Anglo-Jewry, whose deputations answered an appeal from Israel on behalf of the Jews of Germany. The initiative came from German Jewry itself, and it was undoubtedly linked to the British refusal to admit children to Palestine. Israel had already left Germany officially in mid-1939. He went back to Berlin to help Karminski and others in the Frauenbund organize the last groups of children. He left for good only days before the outbreak of war.

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• 7. Last Mission

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  Settling in London, Israel first worked with Bloomsbury House, the organization dealing with German Jewish refugees interned as "enemy aliens." In 1941 he became research assistant on Germany to a Royal Institute of International Affairs committee based at Balliol College, Oxford. That work was done for the Foreign Office, and he also advised the Foreign Office's Refugee Department on the movement of refugees across Europe. His papers from that period include material on German resistance to Hitler. He dismissed the idea, despite his friendship with Adam von Trott, one of the resisters.

  On the 26th of March 1943, Israel left London for Lisbon. He spent the next two months distributing certificates of entry to British-ruled Palestine and investigating the situation of Jews on the Iberian peninsula. Spain and Portugal had right-wing governments with some sympathies for Nazi Germany, yet they refused to hand Jews over to the Germans. Before leaving the peninsula, Israel formulated a plan to rescue Jewish children from Vichy France. His flight from Lisbon to Bristol, British Overseas Airways Corporation Flight 777, was a civilian passenger plane. On the 1st of June 1943, a Luftwaffe patrol of eight Junkers Ju 88 fighters shot it down over the Bay of Biscay. Israel was killed at the age of 43. His plan for the children of Vichy France was partially carried out after his death.

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• 8. Memorials and Museum

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  Beside the ancient Levite city of Tel Yokneam in Israel stands a fourteen-foot memorial to Wilfrid Israel. It also honors all the Jews who risked their lives to save fellow Jews during the Holocaust. The Jerusalem sculptor Sam Philipe designed it, and the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation funded it.

  In Kibbutz HaZore'a, the Wilfrid Israel Museum opened in 1951. It is an archaeology and art museum built around Israel's own collection, to which many artefacts have been added over the years. Its permanent exhibitions cover the art of India, China, Thailand and Cambodia, along with the ancient Near East and local archaeology. Changing exhibitions show modern painting, sculpture, photography and textiles, and an art workshop runs programs for children, youth and adults. In August 2020, burglars stole around 30 artefacts from the museum.

  The filmmaker Yonatan Nir premiered a documentary in Israel on the 1st of November 2016, called The Essential Link: The Story of Wilfrid Israel. It draws on Naomi Shepherd's biography and traces his ties to the founders of Kibbutz HaZore'a. The film focuses mostly on the last ten years of his life.

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