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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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The post A rabbi went down with his torpedoed warship in 1943. Today, his cousin ensures his story is not forgotten. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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How a new tool in Lithuania helps people read letters from their Jewish ancestors
(JTA) — VILNIUS, Lithuania — At a family reunion in California in 2013, Felicita Trueblood discovered a portal to the past: a binder full of letters from her great-grandfather, a rabbi in Ukraine, from before World War II.
As exciting as the discovery was, the letters were illegible to her — until now, thanks to an artificial intelligence tool developed by Sergii Gurbych, a researcher in Lithuania who hungered for information about his own Jewish past. They unveiled a world of grief but also brought Trueblood solace, uncovering the truth about her great-grandfather’s death.
The letters, about 50 pages in total, had sat untouched for decades in her cousin’s house in Palm Springs. They were penned in Yiddish by Pavel Malisoff, Trueblood’s great-grandfather in Konotop, Ukraine — then in the Soviet Union — to his son, Trueblood’s great-uncle Solomon, who immigrated to the United States and changed his last name to Malis.
Between 1927 and 1934, the letters bridged two worlds — on one side, a father in Ukraine witnessing a community on the brink of destruction, and on the other, a son journeying from New York to California under the weight of the Great Depression. Malis died in 1985. For nearly a century, no one else read those pages.
At the 2013 reunion, none of the living family members could decipher their ancestor’s Yiddish letters, written in Hebrew script. Trueblood, who is now 75, felt compelled to take charge of the treasure trove. She grew up in San Diego with few traces of her Jewish past. Her mother, Malisoff’s granddaughter, became a Christian Scientist before marrying her father, a non-Jewish descendant of colonial Americans. Trueblood wanted to know who her great-grandfather was and the life he inhabited, long cut off from her family memory.
“I was raised outside the Jewish community, with no day-to-day connection,” Trueblood told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But I was always fascinated.”
Trueblood soon ran into obstacles. She found only a handful of translators who could help decipher the handwritten letters, and the cost of hiring them to work through the whole stack was prohibitively high.
But 13 years after inheriting the letters, she saw a Facebook post about VILNISH, a new project in Lithuania that aims to turn handwritten and historical printed texts in Yiddish and Hebrew into digital texts that can be easily searched and translated.
Gurbych, a researcher at Vilnius University’s Center for the Study of East European Jewish History, built the AI model behind VILNISH, which launched late last year. Born in Ukraine, Gurbych studied Hebrew and Yiddish on top of electrical engineering. At Vilnius University, he focuses on developing digital approaches to analyzing archival Jewish texts.
Gurbych’s particular interest is texts written between World War I and World War II, when Jewish cultural and intellectual life flourished in Vilnius. In 1925, Vilnius became the first headquarters of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, or YIVO, which continues to preserve the Yiddish language and Eastern European Jewish heritage in New York City.
Gurbych turned to a plethora of diaries, memoirs and other documents that were written by Jews in the interwar period and stored in the National Library of Lithuania. They provided the perfect material to teach a language model to recognize handwritten texts from the period. As he trains VILNISH on more and more handwriting types, it becomes a more universal tool.
Soon after Gurbych publicized the service, he began to hear from people like Trueblood, who sought to read letters left behind by their relatives.
Their urge to connect with the past was familiar to Gurbych. His own grandfather was a Jew born in 1915 in the Polish city of Łódź. During the Holocaust, he escaped the Łódź Ghetto days before its liquidation by the Nazis, when most of the 67,000 Jews who lived there were killed. Gurbych’s grandfather settled in present-day Ukraine in the Soviet Union.
Gurbych is drawn to pieces of writing that evoke the atmosphere, the tastes and smells of life for Jews in Poland before their communities were destroyed.
“I want to know more about the world where my grandfather lived,” said Gurbych. “He died in 2001, and I just feel that I didn’t speak with him about this time enough. He was a person who lived in the Soviet Union, so he was just closed, and didn’t very much like to talk about his Jewish background and about life in interwar Poland.”
Trueblood contacted Gurbych in May. Within a month, he sent her translations of all her great-grandfather’s letters. She was stunned by the vivid images of Malisoff’s life in Konotop, marked by poverty and separation. All of his 11 children were forced to relocate across the Soviet Union or immigrated to Canada and the United States.
Konotop was racked by famine during Stalin’s rapid forced collectivization of agriculture. Malisoff described “people walking half naked, hungry, with only a few coins in their pockets, without a piece of bread, without proper clothing, silently, without work and without money.” The “spiritual condition” was destroyed, he wrote, as the Sabbath, the holidays, kosher food, circumcisions and religious teaching disappeared — “as though they had never existed.”
It wasn’t just an AI language model that supplied her these windows to the past, said Trueblood. Gurbych had the knowledge of Jewish history and religious tradition to explain the terms used by her great-grandfather, a rabbi, and to point her toward the stories and texts that he referenced.
“What I got back was just beautiful, because he understands the context, the history, the biblical references,” she said.
She also made a discovery that shifted her understanding of how her great-grandfather died. Trueblood and her other living relatives knew that Malisoff had been tortured by Stalin’s regime for receiving small packages of money from family members in California. They always believed that was how he died.
But after the letters from Malisoff stopped abruptly in 1934, other letters from his wife and children revealed the truth: Malisoff had died not from torture, but from a heart attack at 74. A letter from one of his children in the Soviet Union gave Trueblood the unexpected gift of her great-grandfather’s dignified death and memorial service.
“Our old father of blessed memory has passed away, but his good and beautiful name has not died,” the letter said. “It lives on, and will continue to live for many years. The town paid him the highest honors. The entire town, old and young alike, accompanied him on his final journey, and he was given the place of highest honor in accordance with his good deeds.”
Gurbych hopes that VILNISH will retrieve such memories for many more people like Trueblood, while also helping academic researchers who face huge sets of archival documents in Yiddish and Hebrew that few people can read.
The tool also has the potential to support the descendants of Jews who were persecuted during the Holocaust as they prepare materials to confirm their eligibility for repatriation or citizenship, such as synagogue records, internal rolls of Jewish communities and other historical documents.
Trueblood was struck by how many others have yet to access threads to their past, as stacks of paper like hers sit untouched in attics and libraries.
“These letters are all over the world,” she said. “There are thousands of them out there that haven’t been translated.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post How a new tool in Lithuania helps people read letters from their Jewish ancestors appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump: ‘The war will be over very shortly after the election’
(JTA) — President Donald Trump heckled the leaders of Iran at the first-ever Republican midterm convention on Wednesday, while promoting the idea of renaming the Strait of Hormuz after himself.
“The war will be over very shortly after the election,” Trump said in a 100-minute address. “They’re hanging out for dear life, hoping that we lose, so they can deal with dumb, weak Democrats, and they can have their nuclear bomb. But we’re not going to let that happen.”
The president expressed confidence that Iran is “going to be quitting or dropping out” of the war “right after Election Day, because they want a deal desperately.”
“We’re winning it,” Trump said, referring to the war in Iran. “We control the Hormuz Strait.”
The U.S. and Israel started the war in February 2026. Since then, Trump has repeatedly predicted victory or an imminent end to the conflict. But six months later, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains severely disrupted amid competing U.S. and Iranian efforts to control the vital waterway.
On Wednesday, Iran said it attacked 10 ships near the strait after the U.S. sank five Iranian oil tankers, in the largest exchange of attacks on shipping by the two sides since the war began.
“I should get something out of this — the Trump Strait,” the president continued, repeating an idea he had proposed about a week ago. “I’ll have an announcement. We’ll call it the Trump Strait, and I’m sure the Iranian leadership will be thrilled with that.”
Declaring that they’re probably not “too happy about anything,” Trump said that Iran “is falling apart” and described the country as “the bully of the Middle East.”
“They’re not the bully anymore,” the president continued. “We’re the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Trump: ‘The war will be over very shortly after the election’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Pro-Israel Providence Mayor Brett Smiley loses to DSA pro-Palestinian challenger
(JTA) — The pro-Israel mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, lost his reelection campaign Wednesday to a progressive pro-Palestinian challenger in the latest demonstration of how Israel politics are seeping into local U.S. elections.
Incumbent Brett Smiley, who converted to Judaism in 2024 while in office, was bested by state Sen. David Morales in the Democratic primary in this deep blue city. Morales, a democratic socialist, carried endorsements from leading progressives, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and California Rep. Ro Khanna. With 99% of ballots counted, Morales had garnered 52.5% of the vote to Smiley’s 47.5%.
During the campaign, pro-Smiley flyers were defaced with Hitler mustaches and devil horns, acts which his opponent condemned.
The city’s Democratic primary also serves as a preview for a significant general election vote on divestment. In November, Providence will become the largest American city to cast a vote on a measure that, despite not naming Israel directly, could stop the city from investing in companies linked to Israel.
Morales supports the binding divestment vote, while Smiley and local Jewish and pro-Israel groups have opposed it. The mayor called the ordinance “both unenforceable and likely in violation of existing state law” in a statement to Jewish Insider.
During the campaign, Morales criticized Smiley for participating in a mayoral summit run by the Combat Antisemitism Movement, in which Smiley serves in a leadership capacity. Morales accused the group of suppressing pro-Palestinian speech and not being transparent about its funders.
The Rhode Island-Israel Collaborative, which promotes business ties between the state and Israel, opposes both the ballot initiative and Morales. Avi Nevel, the group’s founder, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency prior to the primary that Morales was “fueled by pro-Palestinians and Israeli haters.”
It was a night of overthrowing incumbents in the state, as Rhode Island’s sitting governor also lost his primary to an intra-party challenger. That race, however, did not pivot on Israel: Gov. Daniel McKee’s popularity in the state has sunk following a scandal involving the closure of a major bridge.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Pro-Israel Providence Mayor Brett Smiley loses to DSA pro-Palestinian challenger appeared first on The Forward.
