Karl Stern on an unbelievably impractical hero
A Jewish neurologist who escaped Nazi Germany to England and then to Canada, Karl Stern became a noted psychoanalyst and Catholic writer. In 1933, his friend Reha (also Recha) Freier created Youth Aliyah to send Jewish children to Palestine, eventually saving the lives of over 7,000 children. She escaped Germany in 1940 and made her own way to Palestine. He writes about her in his autobiography Pillar of Fire.
Reha (short for Rebekka) was, when I first knew her, quite young. She was married to a Rabbi. She was beautiful, of a simple Biblical beauty, someone right out of the Old Testament. She represented a type which occurs in every political or religious movement, the sort of person who causes others to despair.
She seemed utterly disorganized and full of unbelievably impractical ideas. Although she was a mother of five I am not sure whether she could have fried an egg or made tea. If she did it she might have kept her hat on, even her overcoat — and it would most likely be a man’s coat.
She was an extraordinary linguist, and she was able to keep an audience spellbound. Her Hebrew was beautiful. When she had, in an emergency, to travel to some Balkan country, she was able to learn, on the train, enough of the language to make a speech.
Since she thought and lived on a plane of practical impossibilities, she actually carried things out which no practical person could have achieved. She was the first one to have the idea (long before anyone knew what Nazis were) of getting Jewish children out of Europe and settling them on farms in Palestine. She had this idea before the great American Jewess Henrietta Szold conceived it, or at least quite independent of her.
When there was a pogrom in a Roumanian town, it was not impossible for her to travel there and appear before the mayor, demanding that they organize a transport of Jewish children, a special train and everything. It was her strong point to appear before the most unlikely people, wide-eyed and with flowing robes, speaking not in terms of committee meetings and majority resolutions but in the language which King David used in his Psalms.
With this embarrassingly naive and direct method she occasionally had stunning success.
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