My experiences, which were fairly typical throughout, showed clearly the great need for Jewish chaplains in the army overseas. Even my trip on leave to the Riviera was typical, showing the effect of release from discipline combined with a pleasure trip on thousands of our soldiers, most of whom needed it far more than I; for the privileges of a chaplain, just a little greater than those of most officers, certainly had prevented my morale falling as low as that of many of the enlisted men. The Jewish chaplain was not only a concession to the very considerable body of Jewish citizens who felt that they should be represented in the military organization as well as men of other faiths; he had a definite contribution to make to the moral and spiritual welfare of the forces. We had to conduct Jewish religious services for both holydays and ordinary seasons, to assist the dying Jew, and to pray for him at his grave. We had to defend the Jewish boys in the rare cases of prejudice against them, or, what was just as important, to clear up such accusations when they were unfounded. We had to serve the special needs of the Jewish soldier, whatever they might be, at the same time that we did the chaplain's duty toward all soldiers with whom we might be thrown.

The American Expeditionary Forces never had sufficient chaplains at any time for the work that was planned for them. The proportion desired by the G. H. Q. Chaplains' Office and approved by the war department was one chaplain to every thousand men, or one to an infantry battalion, besides those assigned to administrative work as senior chaplains of divisions and areas, and the very large number detailed to hospitals. The total number of chaplains who went to France was 1285, just half the number needed by this program, and from this total we must subtract a considerable group of deaths, wounds and other casualties. The chaplains' corps was undermanned at all times,—we Jews were simply the most conspicuous example. Compared to the general proportion of one chaplain to every two thousand men, and the ideal one of a chaplain to every thousand, we had one chaplain to every eight thousand men, and those tremendous numbers were not even concentrated in a few units but scattered through every company, every battery, and every hospital ward in the army.

The British forces contained one Jewish chaplain for every army headquarters, or nine in all. I had the pleasure of meeting Rabbi Barnett, the chief Jewish chaplain in the B. E. F., although I never met his predecessor, Major Adler. Through their long experience and the coÖperation of the Chief Rabbi of England, the English chaplains were well equipped with suitable prayerbooks and other material, which I obtained from one of them for the use of our men while I was on the British front. Still, even with their larger proportion of chaplains to the Jews in service, the lack of transportation facilities and the tremendous rush of war-time, especially at the front and in the hospitals, made their actual duties impossible of complete fulfillment.

To cover the enormous field before us was plainly impossible. The chaplain could only work day by day, clearing a little pathway ahead of him but never making an impression on the great jungle about. When I first reached France, I grew accustomed to the greeting: "Why, you're the first Jewish chaplain I've met in France!" That was hard enough then, but it grew harder when the same words were addressed me in Brest just before sailing and on shipboard on the way home. And yet it was inevitable that twelve chaplains could not meet personally the hundred thousand Jewish soldiers scattered through the two millions in the American uniform through the length and breadth of France. Under these circumstances we all feel a natural pride at the work accomplished against adverse conditions. I for one feel that we did all that twelve men similarly situated could possibly have done, and I gladly bring my personal tribute to those others, chaplains, welfare workers, officers, and enlisted men, whose coÖperation doubled and trebled the actual extent and effectiveness of our work. This includes especially the Christian chaplains and welfare workers; their own field was great enough to take all their time and energy, but they were always ready to turn aside for a moment to lend a hand to us, in order that the labors of twelve men serving their faith in the great American army might not be quite futile.

The first of the Jewish chaplains to reach France was Rabbi Elkan C. Voorsanger, who gave up his pulpit in St. Louis in April, 1917, to join the St. Louis Base Hospital as a private in the medical corps. As his hospital unit was the third to reach France in May, 1917, Rabbi Voorsanger was one of the first five hundred American soldiers in the American Expeditionary Forces. In the medical corps he rose from private to sergeant, gaining at the same time an intimate first-hand knowledge of the problems of the man in the ranks. When the bill was passed by Congress in November, 1917, ordering the appointment of chaplains of sects not at that time represented in the army, Rabbi Voorsanger was the first Jew commissioned under its provisions. He was examined by a special board appointed overseas by General Pershing at the direction of the Secretary of War; his commission was dated November 24th, 1917. In January 1918 he was assigned to the 41st Division and in March to Base Hospital 101 at St. Nazaire. While posted there he conducted his first important service overseas in Passover 1918, the first official Jewish service held in the A. E. F. He was assigned to the 77th Division in May 1918 on their arrival in France where he served with a most enviable record, receiving the Croix de Guerre and being recommended for the D. S. M. for exceptional courage and devotion to duty in time of danger. The midnight patrol on the banks of the Meuse, by which he won these honors, was both a courageous and a useful exploit. He was promoted to Senior Chaplain of his division with the rank of Captain, the only Jew so distinguished. Finally in April 1919, instead of accompanying his division home he resigned his commission to become the head of the overseas work of the Jewish Welfare Board. He returned to the United States in September 1919, after two and a half years with the American Expeditionary Forces. Since that time he has continued his self-sacrifice and his devotion to his people in the service of the Joint Distribution Committee for the Relief of Jews in eastern Europe. In 1920 and 1921 he conducted two relief units to Poland and carried on their life-saving work.

When I arrived in France, Chaplain Voorsanger was stationed at Chaumont for the time being, to take charge of the arrangements for the Jewish holydays of 1918. I have already described how these were carried out, by designating central points for services, getting in touch with the French rabbis and synagogue authorities and assigning the few American rabbis at hand to fill in the deficiencies.

I was the fifth Jewish chaplain to reach France. Those who preceded me were first Voorsanger and then Chaplains David Tannenbaum of the 82nd Division, Harry S. Davidowitz of the 78th and Louis I. Egelson of the 91st. All these men served at the front, as did also Chaplain Benjamin Friedman of the 77th Division, who took up the Jewish work of that unit when Chaplain Voorsanger was promoted to the Senior Chaplaincy. Chaplain Davidowitz was the only Jewish chaplain to be wounded, receiving severe injuries from shrapnel; these put him in the hospital for several months and occasioned his being sent back home, invalided, the first of us all. The others, in order of their arrival, were Chaplains Jacob Krohngold, of the 87th Division; Israel Bettan of the 26th Division; Harry Richmond, at the port of Bordeaux; Elias N. Rabinowitz, at Blois; Solomon B. Freehof, at First Army Headquarters; and James G. Heller, at Le Mans. The last two left New York on the day following the armistice, so that on November eleventh, 1918, the Jews of America were represented overseas by just ten chaplains and two representatives of the Jewish Welfare Board, Rev. Dr. Hyman G. Enelow and Mr. John Goldhaar.

The twelve of us represented all three Jewish seminaries in this country, although the majority were naturally from the oldest, the Hebrew Union College at Cincinnati, where Rabbi Freehof was even a member of the faculty. We came from every section of the country, east, west and south, including Krohngold and myself from little towns in Kentucky and Richmond from Trinidad, Colorado. Rabbi Richmond had the unusual distinction of not claiming exemption in the draft as a minister. He therefore entered the service as a private and was promoted to the chaplaincy just before his division went overseas.

The chaplains who were commissioned before the armistice and served in the United States were thirteen in number; Rabbis Nathan E. Barasch, Harry W. Etteleson, Max Felshin, Samuel Friedman, Raphael Goldenstein, Abram Hirschberg, Morris S. Lazaron, Emil W. Leipziger, Julius A. Liebert, Abraham Nowak, Jerome Rosen, Leonard W. Rothstein, Israel J. Sarasohn. Three of them, Rabbis Rothstein, Felshin and Barasch, soon after resigned their commissions and came overseas as representatives of the Jewish Welfare Board. When the great need for morale agencies was realized after the armistice, the War Department refused to relax its prohibition against the transportation of more chaplains or other special branches of the service, but favored the passage of large numbers of welfare workers instead. Rabbi David Goldberg was the only Jewish chaplain in the navy, with the rank of Lieutenant, junior grade; he served at sea on the transport, President Grant.

We were almost all reassigned as our divisions left for home and as the need grew in various areas, especially in the base posts and the Army of Occupation. Chaplain Davidowitz was sent home wounded, and Friedman accompanied his own division back. Krohngold, Bettan, Heller and Freehof joined the Army of Occupation in the order named, although for a long time Rabbi Krohngold was the only Jewish chaplain there. Rabbi Egelson left his division for the port of St. Nazaire, Rabinowitz was transferred from Blois to St. Aignan, and I was left behind at Le Mans together with Heller, who shortly after was transferred to the Third Army in Germany. Tannenbaum while stationed at Bordeaux was also, by special arrangement, appointed as supervisor of the Jewish Welfare Board for that area; and Voorsanger was mustered out of service to become executive director of their overseas work. Rabbi Richmond alone held the same post to the very end of his overseas service.

As I have mentioned repeatedly in my personal narrative, so long as a man was assigned to one division he had some chance of establishing personal contacts with his men and doing effective work among them; as soon as he was assigned to an area, he had to spread himself thin over a wide expanse of territory and could cover it in only the most cursory fashion. The problem was larger than the matter of transportation, although that was serious enough. The larger aspect lay in the number of men, the number of companies, the infinite possibility of individual service if one were only able to know all these soldiers personally, to understand their needs, and to minister to them. Every hospital ward with its forty beds presented forty distinct individual problems,—often, indeed, more than forty. Sometimes the same man would need pay, mail, home allotment, reading matter, and contact with his original unit and comrades. With the constant shifting to other hospitals further from the front and then to convalescent camps, the ward would always contain a new forty men and the work was always beginning over again. This situation was not in the least unique. The hospital simply represents the extreme case of what was true in a less degree in every branch of the service and every unit.

During the post-armistice period I had several very agreeable reunions with my fellow chaplains, which were at the same time valuable for our common information and coÖperation. At my very first visit to Le Mans, on December 6th, I quite unexpectedly met Chaplains Freehof, Bettan, and Heller, as well as Rabbi Enelow, who had just come to the city for the dedication of the J. W. B. headquarters. I devoured their comparatively fresh news from home as eagerly as Voorsanger had absorbed mine several months before, when he was already entering his second year in France. The second time was on the last day of the year, when I met Rabbis Friedman, Egelson and Rabinowitz in Paris, all coming there as I did for the cars which the J. W. B. had ready for us. At the same time Rabbis Martin Meyer of San Francisco and Abram Simon of Washington were in the city, both captains in the American Red Cross. Their six months of duty in France had just expired and they were then making ready for their return home. We all had dinner together at one of the famous Parisian restaurants and discussed war and peace, France, America and Israel, until the early closing laws of war-time sent us all out on the boulevards and home. Chaplain Egelson and I saw the New Year in together, first hearing "Romeo and Juliet" at the OpÉra and then watching the mad crowds on the streets, headed always by American or Australian soldiers, the maddest of them all.

The most important meeting, however, was the one called by Chaplain Voorsanger for February 24th at the Paris headquarters of the Jewish Welfare Board. Six chaplains were present, Voorsanger, Tannenbaum, Richmond, Heller, Bettan and I, together with Mr. John Goldhaar of the J. W. B. Our chief object was to work out a program of coÖperation with the J. W. B., our second, to discuss our personal methods for the benefit of our own work. Voorsanger was chairman; we decided to form a Jewish Chaplains' Association, which never developed afterward; and planned to hold another meeting soon, which owing to military exigencies, we never did. But we did adopt a program of coÖperation with the J. W. B., which indicates the mutual dependency and the closeness of contact which were almost uniformly the case. Our program provided that the J. W. B. should submit to the chaplain the weekly report of the area in which he was stationed and should have relations with the military authorities through him. The chaplain, on the other hand, was to make suggestions to the worker in his area, and in exceptional cases to the Paris office and was to be in complete charge of all Jewish religious work in his area, although religious workers were personally responsible to their superior in the J. W. B. Finally, provision was made for frequent conferences between the chaplain and the J. W. B. worker in the same organization. This program was approved, not only nominally but also in spirit by all the Jewish chaplains and welfare workers throughout the A. E. F. I know that in Le Mans our contact was so close that Mr. Rivitz instructed his religious workers to report directly to me for assignment of services and other division of labor, and I included their work with mine in my weekly reports to my senior chaplain.

On my final visit to Paris at the end of April I found a host of Jewish celebrities gathered together in the interests of the Jewish Welfare Board, the Joint Distribution Committee for the relief of Jews in Eastern Europe, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress. At the office of the J. W. B., I had a farewell conference with Rabbi Voorsanger and Colonel Harry Cutler, giving them a summary of the latest situation in my area. Colonel Cutler was busy as chairman of the J. W. B., one of the American Jewish Congress delegates to the Peace Conference, and a member of the Joint Distribution Committee. I met my old friend, Rabbi Isaac Landman, who was reporting the Peace Conference for his paper, the American Hebrew, and he introduced me in turn to Miss Harriet Lowenstein, at that time the Paris purchasing agent of the Joint Distribution Committee, especially in the important work of buying supplies originally sent to Europe for the use of the American forces. I encountered also three of the active workers of American Jewry, sent to represent us before the Peace Conference in such matters as might concern the Jews; Judge Julian Mack, representing the American Jewish Congress; Dr. Cyrus Adler, for the American Jewish Committee; and Mr. Louis Marshall, a representative of both organizations. The two last were also active in the Jewish Welfare Board, and Dr. Adler, vice-chairman of the Board, took charge as the representative of the Board after Colonel Cutler's departure for the States. Even on the ship going home I met two Jewish workers, Rabbi B. Levinthal of the American Jewish Congress delegation and Mr. Morris Engelman, returning from his work in Holland for the Joint Distribution Committee. By that time world Jewry was fully aroused and its delegates were busy, both at the seat of the Peace Conference and in the lands of eastern Europe, where Jewish suffering was becoming daily more intense.