MONTREAL — The bitter and very public conflict during World War II between upstart Zionist Revisionist activist Peter Bergson (real name Hillel Kook) and the distinguished Rabbi Stephen Wise, the pre-eminent American Jewish leader of the day, over what could be done to save European Jewry is the subject of the latest documentary from the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies.

Retired Quebec Superior Court justice Benjamin Greenberg, right, chair of the Montreal première of the film Against the Tide, produced by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, is seen with the evening’s guest speaker, Member of Parliament Irwin Cotler.   [LuckyDuck photo]

Against the Tide: The Story of America During the Holocaust, narrated by actor Dustin Hoffman, had its Montreal première recently at Congregation Shaar Hashomayim before a capacity audience. It was the first public event of the Friends of the Wiesenthal Centre since the organization opened an office in this city.

The film is an indictment of the American government’s inaction during the Holocaust, but it is the U.S. Jewish leadership, more than the Roosevelt administration, who comes in for the toughest criticism.

Bergson, a largely forgotten figure, is portrayed as the hero and Rabbi Wise, head of American Jewish Congress, the villain.

The film includes extensive footage of a 1977 interview with Bergson, supposedly never seen before, who recounts how he fought against a Jewish establishment fearful of jeopardizing its cosy relationship with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and of stirring up anti-Jewish feeling among the public.

No one speaks up for Rabbi Wise, who died in 1949. He is alleged to have agreed to stay mum on information that the Jews were being systematically exterminated at the request of the government. He is quoted as having said that Bergson was “worse than Hitler” because he would cause anti-Semitism in the United States.

As Against the Tide describes it, this was an era when it was considered vulgar to appear too Jewish and disloyal not to support those in power. Jewish leaders did not want to look like war-mongers before the isolationist U.S. entered the war and did not wish to appear to detract from the main objective of the defeat of Nazi Germany after it did.

Lithuanian-born Bergson, fresh from Poland, where he was organizing clandestine Irgun units, had no such reservations. When he failed to persuade the mainline American Jewish organizations to pressure their government to make the rescue of European Jewry an urgent priority, Bergson took his cause directly to Congress and the public.

Rabbi Wise and the establishment sabotaged his efforts at every turn, we are told. When they couldn’t silence him, they tried to get Bergson deported.

The only group that worked with Bergson was a group of fervently Orthodox rabbis, who formed the Vaad Hatzala and offered to pay Nazi henchman Heinrich Himmler for Jewish lives.

The Roosevelt administration was not keen on taking in Jewish refugees. Breckinridge Long, the official in charge of immigration during the war, determinedly blocked issuing visas to Jews, according to the film.

In an interview, one of Bergson’s daughters says she feels her father, who died in 2001 in relative obscurity, should be better remembered. The Jewish establishment spent more energy fighting her father than pressing the government to save the Jews. History, she indicates, has proven her father’s approach was right.

Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the assimilated Jewish New York Times publisher, is alleged to have buried the increasingly alarming reports coming from Europe about the fate of the Jews for fear of appearing to be making that the focus of the war effort.

Contrast this attitude with Bergson’s  nationwide campaign, which included rallies, newspaper ads, touring a stage play call We Will Never Die, and recruiting celebrities such as Hollywood writer Ben Hecht and Will Rogers Jr., a Democratic Congressman and son of the legendary humorist.

Bergson or the filmmakers never makes clear exactly how the Jews in Nazi-occupied territory could be rescued. Early on, he favoured forming a Jewish army, later bombing the railway lines to Auschwitz was an idea. Bergson acknowledges the actual number of lives such a strike would save may not have been high, but it would have had important symbolism.

According to the film, British prime minister Winston Churchill approved of bombing the tracks, but the U.S. War Department nixed the idea on three occasions.

Rabbi Wise is said to have been convinced until the day he died that his course was right.

The chair of the screening was retired Quebec Superior Court judge Benjamin Greenberg and the film was preceded by an address by Mount Royal Member of Parliament Irwin Cotler.

The evening was opened with Canadian Friends president and chief executive officer Avi Benlolo saying that, during the Gaza conflict, he received numerous hate-filled e-mails and letters, many of them signed. “What is abundantly clear is that these anti-Semites have little fear of identifying themselves.”

He also condemned “the vicious anti-Semitism on our own streets at pro-Hamas rallies… meant to strike fear in the hearts of the Jewish community and Canadian society.”

The economic slump will only exacerbate anti-Semitism, as history has shown, he warned.

Benlolo said the lesson that should be drawn from Against the Tide is that “we have to take our fate into our own hand. Nobody outside the Jewish community is going to do it for us.”