A message written by Mahatma Gandhi expressing his good wishes for a happy Rosh Hashanah on the same day Nazis invaded Poland has been uncovered in an Israeli archive.
The letter from the nonviolent Indian independence campaigner, addressed to a Bombay Jew named A E Shohet, says: “I wish the new year may be an era of peace for your afflicted people.”
It is dated as being written on 1st September, 1939 – the day war broke out in Europe.
Mahatma Gandhi's letter wishing an 'era of peace' for Jews (Image: National Archive of Israel)
It was posted online this week by the National Library of Israel as part of an initiative to review millions of items in their archives.
According to the Library, Shohet was a leading figure from the Baghdadi Jewish community in Mumbai, then known as Bombay.
He was in charge of the Bombay Zionist Association, as well as serving as editor of The Jewish Advocate.
Gandhi had previously been reluctant to declare his views on the ownership of Palestine and the persecution of German Jews. This pushed Shohet to make repeated attempts to influence Gandhi.
He enlisted the help of a wealthy Jewish Zionist architect, Hermann Kallenbach, who Gandhi referred to as his “soulmate”.
Kallenbach had bankrolled the establishment of Tolstoy’s Farm in South Africa in 1910, where he and Gandhi had lived together, conversing about the meaning of life.
In March 1939, Kallenbach arranged for Shohet to interview Gandhi, which he did over the course of four days at Gandhi’s ashram in Wardha.
Later, Gandhi would call the Holocaust the “greatest crime of our time”, but maintained that “the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife” as it “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany”.
