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A rabbi went down with his torpedoed warship in 1943. Today, his cousin ensures his story is not forgotten.
(JTA) — Mark Auerbach was not yet 5 years old when he noticed an unusual stamp in his father’s dresser. The well-worn three-cent stamp featured a drawing of a small group of men and a sinking ship, with the words “The Immortal Chaplains… Interfaith in action.” It piqued his interest, so he asked his father about it.
“Our cousin is on that,” Auerbach, who grew up in Brooklyn, recalls him saying, searching for an age-appropriate explanation. “He said he was a rabbi who died during World War II when his boat was torpedoed by the Germans. He made me promise to make sure that the story is never forgotten.”
It’s a promise that Auerbach, 75, who now lives in Passaic, New Jersey, has taken to heart. He’s made it his life’s mission to keep alive the story of the “Four Chaplains” — who included Auerbach’s third cousin, Rabbi Alexander D. Goode, along with Rev. George Fox, Rev. Clark Poling and Father John Washington. Eighty years ago today, they made the ultimate sacrifice when their ship, U.S.A.T. Dorchester, was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine in the North Atlantic in the pre-dawn hours.
Over the decades, Auerbach has amassed a trove of photos, clippings and memorabilia dedicated to the bravery and faith of these four clergymen — including preserving countless copies of that three-cent stamp, which was issued in May 1948. “It’s an amazing story,” said Auerbach of the chaplains’ heroism. “It just happens to be my family.”
The sinking of the Dorchester is considered one of the country’s worst World War II-era sea disasters: Of the 902 men on board, only 203 survived. As survivors and historians attest, the four clergy — all relatively new soldiers who had befriended one another at the Army Chaplains School at Harvard University — stood out for their calming presence throughout the pandemonium that occurred during the 18 minutes it took for the ship to go under. As the tragedy rapidly unfolded, survivors reported that the chaplains offered prayers, helped distribute lifejackets and, once those ran out, they selflessly gave up their own.
The three-cent stamp dedicated to the Four Chaplains was issued in 1948 and sparked Auerbach’s interest in the story. (Courtesy Mark Auerbach)
“The altruistic action of the four chaplains constitutes one of the purest spiritual and ethical acts a person can make,” reads materials from Four Chaplains Memorial Foundation, whose mission is “to promote Interfaith Cooperation and Selfless Service,” according to their web site. “When giving their life jackets, Rabbi Goode did not call out for a Jew; Father Washington did not call out for a Catholic; nor did the Reverends Fox and Poling call out for a Protestant. They simply gave their life jackets to the next man in line.”
But that’s not all they did. As the ship went down, survivors have said that they saw the four chaplains on deck, linked arm in arm together in prayer. “I could hear men crying, pleading, praying,” Private William B. Bednar, who was floating among the bodies of his shipmates in the freezing water, is quoted as saying in foundation reports. “I could also hear the chaplains preaching courage. Their voices were the only thing that kept me going.”
The four men became friends at chaplains school at Harvard. (Courtesy Mark Auerbach)
According to Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins, the author of “Rabbi Alexander Goode: The Story of the Rabbi and His Three Fellow Chaplains Who Went Down with the USAT Dorchester” in November 2022, the clergy were heard saying their respective prayers as the ship sank: Goode said the Shema; the Catholic priest the Ave Maria, while the two ministers said the Lord’s Prayer. (Exactly how survivors might have heard this is unclear, though Elkins confirmed that the Shema is the last thing a Jew is supposed to say before death.)
Goode was born in Brooklyn in 1911; his father, Hyman Goodekowitz, was also a rabbi. When his parents divorced, he moved to Washington, D.C. with his mother and siblings. Goode was a good student and excellent athlete, and “believed that it was God’s plan for him to pursue a religious calling,” Elkins said.
Goode graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1934 and Hebrew Union College in 1937; in 1940, he got a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. “Education was very important to him,” said Auerbach. In 1935, he married Teresa Flax, who happened to be a niece of Al Jolson; the couple had a daughter, Rosalie, in 1939.
As a rabbi, his first assignment was at a synagogue in Marion, Indiana in 1936; in 1937, he transferred to Beth Israel in York, Pennsylvania, where he remained until he enlisted in July 1942. “He excelled in ecumenicalism — his congregation really praised him and loved him specifically for that,” Elkins said. “He had a wonderful reputation as a scholar, a beloved rabbi and ecumenical person.”
As Elkins writes in his book: “In his new community, Alex made great efforts to spread interfaith understanding. He presented a regular radio program on religious matters. When one of the local churches burned down, he offered to host the congregation’s religious services.”
“He was an extraordinary person, [in addition to] what he did on the Dorchester,” Elkins added.
According to an account from a Dorchester survivor, Petty Officer John J. Mahoney, courtesy the Four Chaplains Foundation, Goode acted selflessly at least one more time that awful morning: He thwarted Mahoney from a foolhardy attempt to return to his cabin for his gloves. Instead, Goode gave Mahoney his gloves, assuring him he had two pairs.
In retrospect, “Mahoney realized that Rabbi Goode was not conveniently carrying two pairs of gloves, and that the rabbi had decided not to leave the Dorchester.”
For a time in the postwar era, the story of the chaplains’ bravery was a popular one, including among children. (Courtesy Mark Auerbach)
During the postwar era, for a while, at least, the story of the Four Chaplains was a popular one. In addition to laudatory articles and the commemorative stamp — plus assorted memorabilia designed to draw the attention of children — memorials were constructed “in nearly every state,” according to Elkins; stained-glass tributes can be found at the Pentagon, the National Cathedral and elsewhere. In Philadelphia, President Harry Truman dedicated a memorial chapel to the Four Chaplains on Feb. 4, 1951. According to a JTA report at the time, some 10,000 “Americans of all faiths” raised $300,000 for the chapel’s construction and furnishings; at the ceremony, Goode’s father read Psalm 96 in Hebrew.
On Dec. 19, 1944, each of the chaplains was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and the Distinguished Service Cross. In 1998, the 55th anniversary of the Dorchester disaster, Feb. 3 was deemed Four Chaplains Day by Congress. And yet, as World War II fades into distant memory, few people today seem to be familiar with the heroism of these men.
“It’s such an important story, such an inspiring story, it needs to be better known,” said Elkins on the impetus for his book.
“This guy certainly was a great role model,” Elkins said of Goode in particular. “We need more Alexander Goode type of people for our youth to look up to, to say, ‘I can be honest, intellectual, committed to my faith and my people, the heritage of Judaism, and I can do honorable things.’”
On Sunday, as he does every year on the Sunday closest to Feb. 3, Auerbach and other chaplains’ family members will attend a memorial mass at St. Stephen’s Roman Catholic Church in Kearny, New Jersey, where he’ll also display his collection of photographs and memorabilia. “The story is so ecumenical that it crosses all kinds of barriers,” he said. “It’s the ‘Golden Rule’ in reality. Every clergy person worth their salt — whatever day their religious observance is, whether its Saturday or Sunday — every one of them is preaching be kind to your brother, your sister. Everyone talks about it, few know about it. This is something for people to grab onto.”
Elkins concurs. “These guys are role models for all of us,” he said. “It doesn’t mean you have to give up your life. There are all kinds of ways people can do great things.”
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How Black music brought me closer to Judaism
Once, while my parents were away, my Grandma Min woke my three siblings and me at five in the morning to lecture us on the proper way to squeeze a toothpaste tube. Funny how effective that was. To this day, I can’t pick up a tube of Crest without thinking about how to squeeze it properly.
Toothpaste incident notwithstanding, I loved my Grandma Min. She was a rule-breaker and a rebel. Among the first Jewish women in Minneapolis to march for civil rights, she regularly hosted Black community leaders in her apartment and served them her own brand of soul food: blintzes, kugel, borscht, and mandelbrot. Everyone she touched — including me — was changed for the better. She’s the one who introduced me to the world’s greatest guitar teacher.
One Sunday afternoon, in the midst of a brilliant sun-shower, Lester Williams pulled up to our house in his pale-yellow Fleetwood Brougham. There’s little question that he was the first Black man to park a Cadillac on our block and walk to the door of a Jewish kid’s house for a guitar lesson.
It was Grandma Min’s idea. She’d seen Lester perform at a Hadassah luncheon, singing songs from Fiddler on the Roof with a big archtop Gibson and a tambourine balanced on his shoe. Afterwards, she asked if he’d teach me.
Lester, who was in his mid-70s at the time, wore a high-rise Don King hairdo and played in a style that was equal parts Texas blues and Yiddish theater. He taught me Sam Cooke’s ”You Send Me” and Lightning Hopkins riffs. When he sang, his eyes closed like he was singing for the Lord.
To this day, I’ve never opened my guitar case without thinking of Lester.
Back then, Jewish felt dorky; Black felt cool. In the early ’70s, a newly bar-mitzvahed kid playing funk and blues was an anomaly. Now, of course, the pop charts are built on it, but in the day it was the Eagles and Jethro Tull, not Kanye and Kendrick Lamar.
I was drawn to the groove and gravitas of Black music — Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, John Lee Hooker. It wasn’t only sound; it was a worldview. There was truth in that rhythm: sophisticated, sardonic, somehow sacred. It hovered between sex and Godliness. You could put a record on the stereo and feel righteous about reproducing the human species to it. To play that music, you had to become it, not just imitate it. I developed a lilting accent that slipped in naturally when I sang, like a thing that made down-in-the-bones sense. Every rock musician had done it in some form — Jagger, Van Morrison, the whole British Invasion.
It was a bridge to something larger, a way to escape the confines of white suburbia and begin what would become a lifelong expansion of my creative and spiritual boundaries. In retrospect, it may have been the first step on the path that led me to become an observant Jew.
Most of the kids around me seemed content inside their circumscribed worlds of hockey, keggers and Sadie Hawkins dances. I wanted to erase the margins someone else had drawn around my life. The times I could do that were rare, but they happened most powerfully when I was making music. It was then that the world lost its edges. The interplay between musicians could feel like one spirit inhabiting separate bodies. That’s how it felt when I first played with Wynston Robyns.
At my cousin Jeff’s house near Cedar Lake, we jammed in the basement — low ceiling, unused shuffleboard court in the floor, winter coats piled on the Ping-Pong table. Some older Black guys from the North Side brought their gear, a little weed, and some Ripple wine. I’d never tried Ripple before. I drank to excess.
Soon the room came alive: guitars tuned, reeds moistened, drums whacked, a few tentative chords tossed out. First rhythm, then flight. Jeff on the Fender Rhodes, me on guitar, all of us tearing it up. After an hour, the alto sax player, Jimmy, said, “You boys gotta meet Wynston Robyns.”
With Jeff’s parents away and my parents asleep and dreaming back at my house, we piled into Jimmy’s car and drove north, well past the safety of our suburb. By the time we reached Wynston’s place it was close to one in the morning. Dim light spilled from the basement windows, bass and drums rumbled from below. When Wynston finally opened the door, he filled its frame: barrel-chested, magnetic, with a half-smile suspended between welcome and menace.
We smoked more weed and played until God knows when. Some Stevie, some Lou Rawls. It was nearly dawn when Jeff and I became the new members of Wynston Robyns and Soul SearchLyte.
Rehearsals were constant — four nights a week, sometimes after school, sometimes before. Neither of us was old enough to have a driver’s license, so we took the city bus.
It took months for Soul SearchLyte to land just two gigs. The first was a corporate lunch my dad attended in a suit and tie. “Wynston seems like a really nice guy,” he said afterward, which was true…mostly. The second was New Year’s Eve at the Holiday Inn downtown. We were the “headliners,” scheduled for 1:00 a.m. — which everyone in the business knows means the time everybody has gone home to party. The real headliners went on at midnight. It was another North Side band, Champagne, featuring Morris Day, André Simone, and a diminutive guy with a large afro.
Jeff and I watched them in awe. André’s bass ran through a Mu-tron Funk Box that made every note sound like it came from the world’s best wah-wah. Morris Day’s drumming was tight, crisp, unstoppable. Wynston leaned toward me and shouted over the groove, “You see that guy? The way he chops out that rhythm? His name’s Prince. They say he’s got a record deal on Warners. Peter, that’s what you need to do if you wanna be more than just a basement guitar player.”
No offense to Soul SearchLyte, but Champagne was a brutal act to follow. By the time we went on at 3:00 a.m., only my Uncle Sonny and the bar staff were still around, mopping the floor while we played our hearts out.
A few weeks later, during rehearsal, our lead guitarist, Larry Crags, announced he was quitting.
“Wynston, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to leave the snap,” he said.
Wynston stared at him. “What the fuck did you just say?”
Larry shifted his weight. “My wife thinks it’s not a good idea — all this practice when we haven’t got any gigs lined up.”
Wynston stepped forward and jabbed his finger into Larry’s chest. “You sayin’ I’m not a man?”
It was strange. Larry hadn’t said anything of the sort.
Before Larry could answer, Wynston swung and caught him square in the face. Larry, who’d once told me in strictest confidence he was a Kung Fu master, fell hard, then rose, bloodied, into a fighting stance. Having been an ardent viewer of Kung Fu, the TV series, I waited for the mystical retaliation. It never came. Wynston hit him again, a clean right hook that sent him flying into my amplifier.
Larry crawled away, whimpering, up the stairs and out of the house. Jeff, maybe out of shock, started playing ”Rock-A-Bye Baby” on the high keys of his electric piano. From behind the drum kit someone said flatly, “Why don’t somebody shut off that amplifier?”
Wynston, panting hard, looked at me. “Peter, I suppose you wanna quit this snap too, since you’ve just seen a Black man beat up on a white dude.”
“No, Wynston,” I said. “I love being in this band.”
Hell yes, I did. I just became the lead guitarist.
Those nights in North Minneapolis — half teachable moment, half transcendence — were my first real taste of faith: the moment when music, spirit and belonging coalesced into one sound, one rhythm, one funky-ass pulse of Creation.
I’m positive Grandma Min would approve.
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In ‘Nuremberg,’ a potent warning about our current politics of denial
“You want to know why it happened here?” asks Howie Triest — a German Jew serving as a U.S. military translator — in the new film Nuremberg. “Because people let it happen. They didn’t stand up until it was too late.”
Triest’s words, as uttered by actor Leo Woodhall, serve as an implicit plea to the film’s contemporary audience: We must stand up against the advancing collapse of our own democracy, before it is too late. Dark resonances appear between scenes in the film and scenes unfolding in today’s United States.
As Hermann Göring, the highest-ranking Nazi not to commit suicide at the war’s end — that is, until after his sentencing — Russell Crowe gives us a deposed and vainglorious charmer still able to exert something of his vanished power, even from his specially constructed prison. And, as in life, the Reichmarschall has a remarkable ability to evade and deflect: He is proud of the work he did for the German people and would do it again, but claims that once the war started, he knew nothing about what went on in the concentration camps — and nor did Adolf Hitler.
Today, Göring’s various lines of defense are striking as the ur-text for Holocaust deniers, as well as for contemporary leaders who strive everyday to re-write reality by lying about it. It is impossible to hear his arguments and not be struck by parallels to the rhetorical devices we see all around us now.
Göring’s arguments relied heavily on “what-aboutism”: He argued many other countries, including the U.S., had also committed crimes against civilian populations. The Nazis were no different. Likewise, President Donald Trump and his defenders have turned to “what-aboutism” over and over. Did Trump refuse to return classified documents upon leaving office after his first term? What about Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails? Insurrection on January 6 ? What about the Black Lives Matter protests? Family-separation policy? Well, Barack Obama’s administration built the cages.
Such comparisons serve to obfuscate vast differences in intent and magnitude. They also erode the very idea that justice exists, or should exist.
The Nuremberg trials marked the first time that individuals — not states — were held criminally responsible for war crimes under international law. They shaped the development of modern international criminal law and institutions such as the International Criminal Court in the Hague — a court that Trump has repeatedly described as illegitimate. They uphold the idea that nothing, including extreme nationalism, is a defense for orchestrated violence against civilians.
But the Nuremberg trials also marked the first time that, under oath, leaders adopted the excuse that they had no concept of, or power over, the injustice executed on their watch. The Nazi leaders in the dock at Nuremberg all claimed, in some way or another, that they did not know of and were not responsible for the fate of the Jews, or anyone else who fell victim to their pitiless brutality. In the film as in life, those claims caused chief prosecutor Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) to summarize their testimony this way: “While there have been enormous crimes, there are no criminals.”
A similar phenomenon was on display earlier this year in the Oval Office, when Trump hosted Salvadorean president Nayib Bukele. Trump’s administration had just deported more than 200 chained and shackled immigrants, many with no criminal record, to an El Salvador prison made infamous by sadistic videos produced by Bukele and copied by Homeland Security head Kristi Noem.
One prisoner, Kilmar Armando Ábrego Garcia, gained particular attention after it was revealed he had mistakenly been deported in violation of a federal immigration judge’s order barring his removal to his native country. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller argued, without evidence, that two judges had declared Ábrego Garcia a member of the MS-13 gang.
And when Bukele visited for an Oval Office meeting, the administration’s line was clear: they did not have the power to return Ábrego Garcia. His fate, in the words of Miller, was at the “sole discretion of El Salvador.”
Heads turned to the Salvadorean president, who smiled enigmatically. “How could I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” Bukele asked. “Of course, I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous.”
And the situation was indeed preposterous. No one, it seemed, was responsible for Ábrego Garcia’s fate. (Ábrego Garcia was eventually returned to the U.S. in June; the Trump administration is still trying to deport him.)
There have been many previous comparisons between Trump’s government and Hitler’s. Many have focused, including in the Forward, on Hitler’s first year in power, when Hitler hollowed out the civil service and re-stocked its ranks with loyalists; cracked down on the media, the universities, the judiciary, and the military; and began a campaign of horror in which Germans began to see their neighbors brutally arrested and imprisoned.
Crucially, the seeds of Göring’s Nuremberg defense were present at that time as well. Hitler and his top men characterized all reports of their barbarity as false, exaggerations spread by foreign enemies and a hostile media. Such evasions, too, are in abundant supply today.
After only two months in power, the Nazis made it illegal to protest or oppose them in any way. The Trump administration has taken frightening steps in the same direction. After several lawmakers who served in the military or the intelligence community this week posted a video in which they spoke directly to U.S. service members, urging them to uphold the Constitution and to defy “illegal orders” amid the Trump administration’s promise to send the National Guard “and more” into democratic-leaning cities, Trump posted on social media that the video constituted “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH.”
Miller added that the video represented “insurrection — plainly, directly, without question.”
Nuremberg is based on the life of psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), whose encounters with Göring form the core of the film. After the trials, Kelley wrote that he found the Nazi leaders to be by and large “commonplace people whose personalities could be duplicated in any country of the world today.” They were responding, as people always will, to the opportunities presented by serving a corrupt leader, one whose only demand is fealty.
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Trump says he and Mamdani ‘didn’t discuss’ NYC mayor-elect’s vow to arrest Netanyahu during congenial meeting
(JTA) — Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani covered a lot of ground in their highly anticipated meeting at the White House Friday afternoon, discussing agenda items such as housing and affordability.
One topic that apparently did not come up, however, was Mamdani’s vow to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he step foot in New York City once Mamdani takes over as mayor on January 1.
“We didn’t discuss the second part of your question,” Trump told a reporter following the private meeting, referring to a question about whether he would stop Mamdani from arresting Netanyahu.
Mamdani’s promise to arrest Netanyahu is on the basis of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court, to which the United States is not a party. Later, when asked about Mamdani’s frequent references to following international law, Trump deflected the question, saying, “I don’t know what you’re referring to in terms of, it could be covered by international law, local laws, it’s covered by a lot laws, it’s covered by U.S. law,” and ultimately allowed Mamdani to answer.
“I think what I’ve shared with the president is our desire to not only follow the laws of our own city, laws that protect New Yorkers, but also desire for consistency in our politics across the board,” Mamdani said.
The mayor-elect’s promise to arrest Netanyahu is seen as an area that could lead to conflict between the president, who considers Netanyahu an ally, and the New York City mayor-elect, who accuses Netanyahu of committing a genocide.
But there was little conflict Friday afternoon during a meeting that was viewed as crucial in ensuring that New York City retains federal funding that Trump has threatened to cut and that Mamdani can get the security clearance typically afforded to mayors.
Trump was effusive in his praise of Mamdani, who like him rose to power on populist sentiment and after overcoming traditionalists in their party. He called Mamdani “hopefully a really great mayor,” and the overall dynamic between the two leaders was chummy despite their political differences and name-calling in the lead-up to the mayoral election.
Trump has referred to Mamdani as “my little communist,” while Mamdani has called Trump a “despot” — a position he was asked about again Friday, and which Trump brushed aside.
Mamdani was asked multiple times about his accusations that Trump is a “fascist,” initially answering that “President Trump and I, we are very clear about our positions and our views.” When asked again, Mamdani began answering the question indirectly, before Trump let him off the hook with an easy out.
“That’s OK, you can just say yes,” Trump said, patting Mamdani on the arm and laughing. “It’s easier than explaining.”
“I’ve been called a lot worse than despot,” Trump also said.
Trump and Mamdani addressed questions on issues including Israel’s war in Gaza and Jewish safety in the city, following a half-hour meeting closed to the press.
“I think you feel very, very strongly about peace in the Middle East,” Trump said to Mamdani, answering a question about the region.
Mamdani replied that he’d asked Trump voters in New York why they voted for the president, and one answer he’d hear repeatedly was: “They wanted an end to forever wars. They wanted an end to the taxpayer dollars we have funding violations of human rights.”
Mamdani was later asked about his accusations that the U.S. government was committing genocide. The mayor-elect corrected the reporter, saying, “I’ve spoken about the Israeli government committing genocide, and I’ve spoken about our government funding it.”
He continued, “And I shared with the president in our meeting about the concern that many New Yorkers have of wanting their tax dollars to go to the benefit of New Yorkers, and their ability to afford basic dignity.”
The meeting came one day after a protest outside an Upper East Side synagogue that was holding an event promoting immigration to Israel drew condemnations; Mamdani’s spokesperson said he “discouraged” the language used in the protest, but suggested the event was a misuse of the “sacred space.”
A question about Jewish safety was asked immediately after the press conference concluded, which Mamdani stuck around to answer, though he did not address Thursday’s protest.
“I care very deeply about Jewish safety and I look forward to rooting out antisemitism across the five boroughs and protecting Jewish New Yorkers and every New Yorker who calls the city home,” Mamdani said.
Trump praised Mamdani’s decision to keep Jessica Tisch, who comes from a prominent Jewish family, as his police commissioner.
“He just retained a great police commissioner,” Trump said. “He retained I think somebody that is a friend of some people in my family, Ivanka, and they say she’s really good, really competent.”
While Mamdani’s appointment of Tisch has reassured some Jewish New Yorkers concerned about the community’s safety, others more critical of Mamdani were not swayed.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, who is running for governor as a Republican, has positioned herself as a bulwark against antisemitism who will prevent Mamdani from achieving the state legislative wins necessary for his democratic socialist agenda.
But Trump appeared to undercut Stefanik, disagreeing with her claim that Mamdani is a “jihadist.”
“No, I don’t,” Trump said, when asked if he believed he was seated next to a jihadist on Friday. “But she’s out there campaigning. You say things sometimes in a campaign.”
Praising Stefanik, he said, “She’s a very capable person.” Then he said about Mamdani, “I met with a very rational person. I met with a man who really wants to see New York be great again.”
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