Rabbi Judah Nadich, a leader of Conservative Judaism who as Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s adviser on Jewish affairs battled the deplorable conditions faced by Holocaust survivors in displaced persons camps after World War II, died Aug. 26 at his home in Manhattan. He was 95.
The cause was heart failure, said his grandson Natan Meir.
Rabbi Nadich, who was also an early advocate of civil rights for blacks and for the ordination of women as rabbis, led the Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan for 30 years, until his retirement in 1987.
In 1945, when he was a lieutenant colonel in the Army and its senior Jewish chaplain in Europe, and when the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps were being fully revealed, Rabbi Nadich was named to the new post of Jewish adviser to Eisenhower. With hundreds of thousands of survivors moved by the victorious armies into so-called DP camps set up by the Allies, Rabbi Nadich became appalled at the conditions they faced.
In his book “Eisenhower and the Jews,” Rabbi Nadich told of entering the Feldafing DP camp outside Munich on Aug. 29, 1945, and finding the situation incomprehensible: Up to 40 survivors were crammed into rooms designed for six people. Food supplies were insufficient. Few people could receive passes to leave the camp each day. Roofs leaked, and the walls of the barracks were not insulated.
The survivors were surrounded by barbed wire, just as they had been in concentration camps. At the same time, he wrote: “The conquered Germans had complete freedom.”
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Rabbi Nadich wrote that when he and others made the situation clear to Eisenhower, he “understood it completely.” Eisenhower issued an order, the rabbi wrote, “that laid the groundwork for a new American policy toward Jewish displaced persons and for an entirely new attitude toward them, at first by the Supreme Headquarters and gradually filtering down to the lower levels of command.”
Rabbi Nadich led Conservative congregations in Buffalo and in Chicago before enlisting in the Army as a chaplain in 1942.