Tisha Be’av and the First World War

The declaration of war happened on the day that Jews mourn the Temples' destruction.

By LARRY DOMNITCH
Jewish Temple (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Jewish Temple
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
According to tradition, the Messiah is born on Tisha Be’av. It also stands to reason that the redemption of the Jews can only follow their exile.
On Tisha Be’av, the First and Second Jerusalem Temples were destroyed and Judean independence was lost to the Romans following the fall of the city of the city of Beitar, the last stronghold of the Bar Kochba revolt. As a result, the Jews lost their spiritual center and were exiled from their homeland.
Many additional tragedies throughout history have marked the day of Tisha Be’av. One of the most ominous was August 1, 1914. On that day Germany had declared war on Russia, transforming the European conflict between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Serbians backed by Russia to a World War between opposing alliances.The declaration of War on Tisha Be’av, 1914, brought the unthinkable to reality. Millions died. New weapons technologies produced tools for killing en masse; better artillery, poison gas canisters, tanks, airplanes for dropping bombs from the skies. Civilians caught in the fighting often faced persecution, expulsion, starvation and disease. Over one million Armenians were systematically massacred by the Ottoman Turks.
The 20th century was a post-Enlightenment era where new ideologies viewed mankind as the arbiter of his actions, possessing a personal autonomy free of any controlling dogma. Yet, man’s primal instinct endured, and his capacity for evil had not diminished despite the onset of modernity.
This storm that had swept over the world severely impacted the Jews who were caught in the middle. Young Jews stood on different sides of the lines, in trenches facing enemies some of whom were fellow Jews. Amid the chaos of war, Jews were targeted, suffering pogroms at the hands of Cossacks, and mass expulsions in Poland and Galitzia by the orders of Russian commanders. It is estimated that between 500,000 and one million Jews were forced from their homes.
FOLLOWING THE war, Jews would face additional horrors. Catastrophic massacres during the Ukrainian Civil War of 1919-1920, a rise of anti-Semitism throughout Europe and the world. The rise of Communism following the 1917 Russian Revolution which was also a direct result of the war would soon threaten Jewry with a new, virulent form of anti-Semitism. Nazism would gain a foothold in Germany, and grow with the rise of Hitler, and the eventual economic chaos of the Great Depression of the early 1930s.
The year 1914 was a massive storm upon the world and the Jewish People. Rabbi Yehudah Leib Graubart in the introduction of a book he authored on the extreme difficulties of World War I cites a sentence from the Psalms: “Hashem looks to the Earth and it quivered” (104:32). The events of 1914 shook the world, and the aftershocks from those events are still felt. The letters of the Hebrew word tirad, or quivered, from the above quotation is the numerical equivalent of the Hebrew year 5674, which is 1914.
But perhaps the war which shook the world and caused hatred against the Jews to surface, which so often accompanies chaos, also unleashed powers of redemption.As victorious British and allied forces over the Turks in the Middle East were completing the conquest of Palestine in 1917, the famous Balfour Declaration endorsing Jewish statehood in the Land of Israel was issued. During this era of nationalism and the advocating of national rights for minority groups, the Balfour Declaration had received support among many world leaders. It was both an era of both widespread anti-Semitism as well as support for Jewish statehood.
War-weary Jewish communities around the world paused, and celebrated. A popular Yiddish daily, Dos Yiddishe Folk, stated, “For the first time in two thousand years we again enter into the arena of world history as a nation which deserves a national home.” The religious Zionist movement Mizrahi stated, “It seems that Holy Providence which guided Israel in its long night of exile is about to reward the Jewish people for all their suffering and tribulations.”
However, that dream, although appearing near, was still distant. Its realization was soon prevented by the British who enacting severe restrictions on Jewish immigration into the land and implemented the infamous MacDonald White Paper of 1939 which called for 15,000 Jewish immigrants per year the next five years, and nullified the principle of Jewish statehood as called for by the Balfour Declaration. With no sanctuary, European Jewry was doomed.
The Balfour Declaration did not cause the rebirth of the Jewish state, but it did give Zionism international support and caused its eventuality. Zionism gained a footing during these tragic and trying times.
Ninety-eight years later, the Jewish world still lives in the shadow of the dark days of ‘The Great War” of 1914-1918. Forces of hate still abound and clamor for the destruction of Israel and Jewry. The euphoria of the events of November 1917 has ultimately led to Jewish statehood and the continual ingathering of the exiles. The Jews en masse have returned and reconnected with their spiritual home. They no longer need to be prey for their enemies in foreign lands as in the days of that horrific conflict.The hope of Tisha Be’av yesterday and today; that the light of redemption shines bright, illuminating the world, and that sorrow be a painful memory of the past.The writer is an educator and author.