Germany Declares War on Russia; the Chafetz Chaim Reads the Telegram and Weeps

Five weeks earlier, on the twenty-eighth of June, a Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip had shot an Austrian archduke in a car in Sarajevo. What could have been a small Balkan quarrel had, through a chain of alliances no one seemed able to stop, dragged every great power in Europe to the edge of war. Austria declared war on Serbia. Russia mobilized to defend Serbia. On the first of August — a Saturday afternoon, the ninth of Av — the German ambassador in St. Petersburg handed over his government's declaration of war on the Russian Empire. Within days France and Britain would be in as well.

The heart of Ashkenazi Jewry lay directly on the coming front. The shtetlach of Poland, Lithuania, Galicia, and Volhynia — more than five million Jews — spread along the line where the German and Russian armies would meet. Russian generals, assuming Yiddish-speakers were secretly sympathetic to the German-speakers on the other side, would within weeks begin expelling entire Jewish communities from the border regions at bayonet-point. The yeshivot of Slabodka and Volozhin would be evacuated deep into Russia. Cossack units would loot villages behind the lines.

In the small town of Radin, in what is today Belarus, an old rabbi read the telegram. Rabbi Yisrael Meir ha-Kohen — the Chafetz Chaim, named for his famous book on the laws of speech, and the most beloved posek of his generation — began to cry. His students, alarmed, gathered around him. He told them: this is the beginning of chevlei Mashiach, the birth-pangs of the redemption. But the peace that ends this war, he warned, will plant the seed of a war much more terrible. He said this in 1914. He was describing a war that had not yet been imagined.

The four years of fighting would kill more than a hundred thousand Jewish soldiers in the armies of the various sides. The immediate aftermath — the pogroms in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War of 1918 to 1921, led by Symon Petlyura's forces and others — would kill more than a hundred thousand Jewish civilians on top of that. Three empires — Russian, Austrian, Ottoman — would fall. The Balfour Declaration would come out of the same war, opening the door to a Jewish national home in the Land. And in the crushed, ruined Germany that would rise on the losing side, an unemployed corporal named Adolf Hitler would find his voice.

That the war began on the ninth of Av was, to the Chafetz Chaim and to those who read history through the eyes of Torah, no coincidence at all. The next dispatch is what he was afraid of.