final veterans

HHaammooddiiaa November 8, 201218
FE ATURE

IInnyyaann MMaaggaazziinnee 23 Cheshvan 5773 19
In honor of Veterans Day, Hamodia salutes this beneficent country of ours, the
United States of America, and the Orthodox servicemen who served their
country along with so many other Jews. With full civic and religious rights,
Jews in this country have been free of systemic persecution, civil limitations,
and official discrimination since its establishment. Not only have we been able
to build our families and our communities without fear, we also have the
opportunity to take advantage of a plethora of government programs and
projects that benefit our religious institutions.
We will focus here on the military personnel who served during the Vietnam
War era, when the United States became involved in an anticolonial uprising
against the French government in Vietnam, Southeast Asia, to prevent the
takeover of South Vietnam by the Communist-led North Vietnamese. Join us as
we learn about the experiences of Orthodox servicemen in the U.S. armed
forces at that time, and how they dealt with the challenges they faced.
OurBoysat
BY REBBETZIN FAIGIE HOROWITZ
BootCamp

A Third-Generation Soldier
“I didn’t mind serving my country,”
says Mr. Michoel Silberberg, a Boro Park
resident who was working in 1963 when
he was drafted. “My father had served in
the United States Army when he was
drafted in early 1945, despite being the
father of three children. This country was
good to us, and when I told my maternal
grandmother that I had been called up,
she reminded me that her father, who had
been born in Yerushalayim in 1898, had
been drafted by the Turkish government to
fight in World War I.”
Mr. Silberberg’s grandfather, Rabbi
Avraham Binyamin B. Auerbach, z”l,
who was later known as the
Yerushalayimer Rebbe, served as a captain
in the Turkish cavalry when he was a
bachur. Posted to Romania, he found
himself in Iasi (Jassi) after the war ended,
where he married Devorah Gottesman.
After their first child was born, they
immigrated to Brooklyn.
“When I was drafted, I took along my
hotplate, my tefillin, my Chumash, and my
Code of Jewish Law to Fort Jackson, South
Carolina. I was determined to maintain
my observance at all costs. And the
challenges came quickly.
“I had no beard, but I did have peyos.
When you arrive at the induction center,
the army gives you a crewcut, basically
shaving off all your hair to take away your
civilian identity, so they could establish
your identity as a soldier. I refused to let
them cut off my peyos. I arrived Thursday
before Thanksgiving, and I spent the
weekend in the brig [military jail].
“Monday morning, I was taken to the
general’s office. I took along my Code of
Jewish Law in English and showed him the
places where peyos, kashrus, and Shabbos
are detailed. General Gaines-Pérez was a
devout member of the Greek Orthodox
Church. He had a lot of respect for
Judaism, and he was a good shaliach for
the rest of my stay. He saw that I was
adamant about keeping halachah. He told
me, ‘I cannot send you home,’ so he put
MR. YISOCHER M. SILBERBERG MR. MICHOEL SILBERBERG
A postcard showing the entrance to the Fort Jackson army base.

me in the tent city and I served out basic
training without any problems. I am also
thankful to this day for the chizuk I got on
the base from Dr. Yehuda Sorscher” (see
below).
Mr. Silberberg existed on fruits and
vegetables from the mess hall, along with
beer, which the army supplied in excess,
and he lost forty-six pounds. He says he
went out of his way to fulfill every
halachah and custom. He washed negel
vasser and davened daily before doing
whatever job he was assigned. After basic
training he drove a bread truck.
“In the army, they gave you a job until
they shipped you out. In my case, the
generals saw that my Yiddishkeit was going
to interfere with my service as a soldier. So
they gave me an honorable discharge
after the requisite number of days. Had
there been a real war, this would not have
happened.”
U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War.

He Finished Shas Four Times
Mr. Joseph Aufrichtig’s experience was
similar to Mr. Silberberg’s in terms of
being able to keep Shabbos and
halachah, although it involved a weekly
request to be relieved of duty on Shabbos.
He always received permission in the
end, but he was extremely tense while he
waited for the weekly approval.
Joseph enlisted in the reserves in 1962,
the day after he dropped out of medical
school. This was a calculated act,
since he knew that had he waited
to be drafted after leaving school,
he would be sent to active duty
abroad. As an enlistee, he would
undergo the usual two-month
basic training, and then become a
reservist.
“Fort Dix, New Jersey, had no
accommodations for frum soldiers, but
the Young Israel prepared us
beforehand,” he states. “They explained
to us how to manage kashrus, how to use
the mess kit, and more. Out of 35,000
trainees at Fort Dix, there were twelve
KBs, ‘kosher boys.’ One Norwegian-
American fellow would follow me
around and eat the food I wouldn’t eat. I
lost a lot of weight.
“I never had to be mechallel Shabbos
and always tried to make a kiddush
Hashem wherever I went. I knew who I
was. I was a strong person and could
stand up for my beliefs. I am glad I
served. At the time I felt it was the right
thing to do. I’m alive and my
grandparents remained alive because
this country took them in,” continues this
proud Flatbush retiree who has
completed Shas four times.
The KB boys were told to stay out of
sight on Shabbos since they were going to
be off duty and would not be in uniform.
They spent all of Shabbos in the chapel,
walking back to their barrack after the
seudah on Friday night and returning
again on Shabbos morning,
staying there for the rest of the day.
“That’s when we saw each
other. The chaplain was a
Conservative rabbi, but he sent his
assistant to New York regularly to
MR. JOSEPH AUFRICHTIG
(Above) A postcard showing rifle practice at the army base in Fort Dix, N.J.
(Below) Recruits stand in the chow line during basic training at Fort Dix, circa 1960.

get us kosher food. On Shabbos we had
three full kosher meals. During the week
we subsisted on cereal and milk, for the
most part. No one gave us trouble with
Yom Tov either.”
After basic training, Joseph was
assigned for four months to a hospital
unit, where his responsibilities included
transporting wounded soldiers wherever
they needed to go. Later he spent one day
a week training as a reservist, and then
every summer for six years he served at
Camp Drum in Watertown, New York, for
two weeks.
Dental Care and Kiruv
Popular Boro Park dentist Dr. Yehuda
Sorscher was in dental school at the time
of the Vietnam War. Many dentists were
drafted during that period because the
U.S. Army wanted to make sure its
soldiers received good dental care before
they were sent into combat. Many
draftees from the South and West had not
received dental care until they entered
the service. Simple reparative dentistry
was the order of the day. Many Jewish
physicians also served during this time
and were made officers, like the dentists.
“I decided to enlist following my
completion of NYU Dental School so I
would get the mandatory two years in
the army over with before starting my
practice. I was married at the time, with
two small children, and was told that I
would have to report to Fort Sill,
Oklahoma, after basic training. I was
advised to travel down to Washington to
negotiate a change in orders so that we
could be near a Jewish community with a
mikveh. I was then reassigned to Fort
Jackson, South Carolina, about 120 miles
from the small, warm Jewish
congregation Brith Sholom Beth Israel of
Charleston, South Carolina, led by Rabbi
Hersh Galinsky, brother of the well-
known Rabbi Mallen Galinsky of
Yeshivas Shaalvim.”
Dr. Sorscher first spent some weeks in
basic training at Fort Sam Houston in
San Antonio, Texas, learning to shoot,
read maps, and march, as all soldiers do,
even though the dentists were bumped
up to the rank of captain. There were two
frum groups on base, and the officers
were able to make their own living
arrangements. Dr. Sorscher chose to live
on Lackland Air Force Base with Rabbi
Yehuda Samet, who later became a
senior instructor at Yeshivas Ohr
Somayach in Yerushalayim.
In Columbia, South Carolina, where
the sprawling Fort Jackson Base dwarfed
the town, the family was reunited after
his basic training, and at first they lived
off the post. Dr. Sorscher worked in the
Congregation Brith
Sholom Beth Israel of
Charleston, S.C.

dental clinic all day, getting excellent
professional experience. He was able to
switch duty with others so that he was off
on Shabbosos and Yamim Tovim. Once in
a while he was pulled in by his colonel,
who checked to see if he was properly
fulfilling his duties. “There was a mesorah
among the frum military men on how to
handle such situations, so I was okay,” he
says.
Then, when the Sorschers moved onto
the post, they helped to develop a sense of
community with the other Jewish
professionals, as well as the draftees. The
challenge was how to find frum draftees in
what was actually a mini-city. The Jewish
chaplain’s assistant helped identify
Orthodox men even though he wasn’t
Orthodox himself. The message was
spread that anyone who found an
Orthodox Jew should inform him that he
could find other Orthodox Jews at the
chapel on Shabbos. The multipurpose
chapel became the shul on Shabbos and a
place of worship for Christians on
Sundays.
“If a soldier didn’t identify himself as
Sabbath-observant at the outset, he wasn’t
allowed to change,” recalls Dr. Sorscher’s
wife, Esther. “The pressures on the young
recruits not to be Shabbos observant were
hard and heavy. If you were wavering in
Yiddishkeit, you could fall, and the
presence of a Reform chaplain was of no
help. We felt we were there for a purpose,
to take care of the frum boys and give
them chizuk.”
Many of the boys were marginally
observant. Most draftees did not have a
strong yeshivah background and were
vulnerable, but some became more frum.
“Those who did faced a moral test
successfully, and they took a stand,” she
recalls.
The army experience was a challenge
for the Jewish soldiers on other levels too.
Its goal was (and is) to toughen up the
recruits physically and emotionally during
basic training, and the army used all
means to do it. Mrs. Sorscher says that
many of the soldiers who joined them for
Shabbos meals were shell-shocked by their
training. She remembers David
Schonbrun’s “humorous” comments.
“This week I learned to kill,” he would
announce. “This week I learned to get
through the mud,” he reported another
time. For him, Shabbosos with the
Sorschers were enjoyable and full of
camaraderie.
David was completely unprepared for
call-up. He was finished with college and
working in 1964 when suddenly, at the
age of twenty-three, he was drafted. “I got
the shock of my life. My father went to the
Skverer Rebbe for a brachah, and we tried
getting me into the National Guard.” But
they did not succeed, so he had no choice
but to serve. He spent twenty-one months
Continued after Kinyan Magazine
U. S. Jewish war veterans
pose for photos next to
the Jewish Chaplains’
Memorial on October
24, 2011, at Arlington
National Cemetery in
Arlington, Virginia.

in the army, ultimately receiving an early
discharge because he served overseas.
All Jewish soldiers were welcome at the
Sorschers’ Shabbos table on post, and they
were allowed to help themselves to the
food that Mrs. Sorscher cooked. Dr.
Sorscher had prepared a young boy from
the Columbia, South Carolina, Jewish
community for his bar mitzvah, and his
grateful father sent huge ice cream freezers
for the chapel. Mrs. Sorscher used them to
freeze the chicken and burger dishes she
prepared, which were accessible to the KBs
all week. She was the only frum woman
there and considered it her duty to
encourage the Jewish boys. One officer’s
wife said to her, “You spend as much
money as we spend on all kinds of things
at the Post Exchange, only you put it all
on the table.”
Food was only part of the kiruv effort.
Mrs. Sorscher taught in the Talmud Torah,
and Dr. Sorscher gave Torah classes once a
week to the doctors and dentists.
The Sorscher home was the oasis
of warmth and love for the young
boys struggling to keep their Jewish
identity during basic training, and
many still recall how much this
meant to them.
Soul in Seoul
David Schonbrun trained as a
chaplain’s assistant. He was shipped to
Korea from San Francisco in 1964. Upon
his arrival in Seoul, Korea’s capital and
the U.S. army’s main staging base, he
found that there were no openings for
chaplains’ assistants, and he was due to
be sent to the DMZ, the demilitarized zone
in the Vietnamese jungle. Seoul had a
kosher kitchen, a Shabbos minyan, and a
strong Jewish presence.
“I wasn’t interested in leaving,” he
says. “I met a priest named Father Joe. He
saw that I was religious and
wanted to stay near Jews and a
kosher kitchen. He changed my
work orders and gave me a job in
the post office so that I was able to
stay.
Continued from page 24 in Inyan Magazine
MR. DAVID SCHONBRUN
The famous U.S. recruiting poster.

“We had beautiful Shabbosos in Seoul
with minyanim, seudos, shalosh seudos, and
melaveh malkahs together. We were off
from work from Friday afternoon until
Monday. We had plenty of kosher supplies
from the Jewish Welfare Board. Ten
thousand pounds of kosher meat
came in every six months.
Someone had taught a Korean
woman a few years back to
make cholent, challah,
and other traditional
Jewish foods so we had
everything we needed.”
One Shabbos the group had a surprise
visitor from New York, a Skverer chassid in
the shirt business who was traveling in the
Far East. He was told that in Seoul one
could enjoy a real Shabbos — and he did,
complete with his shtreimel and bekeshe.
Later, he told his Rebbe about the
experience. The Skverer Rebbe, zy”a, sent
David Schonbrun, whose father went to
(Above) A Jewish Welfare Board uniform and hat.
(Center) Jewish Welfare Board stationery.
(Below) A Jewish Welfare Board postcard, 1919.

the Rebbe for brachos, a handwritten letter
stating that the zechus of hosting
Yiddishkeit in Southeast Asia was the
Korean nation’s sole purpose in this world.
“For me, the army was a worldly
experience,” Mr. Schonbrun says. “I was
always frum. It was key to who I was. I
was an adult when I was drafted, and I
had to live up to being a frum Yid. I was
the only Jew in my unit, and I was ten
thousand miles from home. I was
conscious of mitzvos and my obligation to
be Jewish for myself, but also to help
others. They say that there are no atheists
in foxholes, and it’s true. Other Jewish
guys were interested in Yiddishkeit if we
showed them. All in all, it wasn’t hard to
be a shomer mitzvos in Seoul. We had all
the tools; we did all right.”
(Above) A Jewish Welfare Board Passover for American soldiers in Dijon, France, 1919.
(Right) A Jewish Welfare Board poster, New York, 1918.
“They say that there
are no atheists in
foxholes, and it’s true.
Other Jewish guys
were interested in
Yiddishkeit if we
showed them. ... It
wasn’t hard to be a
shomer mitzvos in
Seoul.”

A Stranger in a Strange Place
Dr. Mordechai Benenstock’s story of
his army experience started almost like
Dr. Sorscher’s. They were in the same
shomer Shabbos group at NYU Dental
School, and he signed up for the reserves
during the first year for the same reasons
his colleague did — for the officer’s pay
and excellent professional experience,
and in order to finish his military service
before starting a practice.
“I didn’t even know that the United
States had a military presence in
Vietnam when I signed up. I was told it
was a practical thing to do once I finished
school and that I shouldn’t defer it too
long because student deferments [of
military service] kept you eligible for the
draft until the age of thirty-five.”
He deferred service for a year longer
than his friends, and that made all the
difference. After a year, during the big
American military push against the
Vietcong in 1966, he found himself on a
plane headed to Vietnam. Although he
was a new father with a three-week-old
baby, he was sent off to an army camp in
Saigon in a really dangerous zone.
“There was no kosher food, nothing.
There were no shomrei mitzvos,” he
recalls. “They thought I was taking my
blood pressure every morning when I put
on tefillin. I was a yeshivah boy who grew
up in Brooklyn, went to Yeshiva
University and then to New York
University [Dental School]; I had never
associated with non-Jews. It was a major
eye-opener to witness the preoccupation
of my fellow soldiers and officers with
physical pleasures and immorality. I was
shocked.”
Captain Benenstock’s request to be off
on Shabbos in exchange for covering for
other dentists so they could have time off
was moved up the chain of command.
His commanding officer spoke to the
general in charge of all the dentists in
Vietnam, who in turn conferred with a
Jewish chaplain. The result was a transfer
to Nha Trang, a magnificent tourist
location on the banks of the South China
Sea in the south–central part of the
country. Although he was unaware of it
at the time, Benenstock had been labeled
a religious fanatic by his superiors. So
when he made his request not to work on
Shabbos, his new commanding officer
answered in the affirmative. In Nha
Trang he did have company — a YU
musmach, who was the chaplain there,
and two other shomer Shabbos soldiers,
with whom he spent Shabbosos.
“It was a very frightening and lonely
time,” recalls the Brooklyn dentist. “I
worked in the clinic and tried to stay near
Americans only. It was dangerous. We
lived with constant uncertainty. It was
not a matter of good guys versus bad
guys. You couldn’t trust that the South
Vietnamese weren’t Vietcong [enemy]
sympathizers. The Vietcong spoke and
acted like all other South Vietnamese.
The grocery man, the porter, and the
man in town could shoot you.”
For one Purim, he arranged to spend
his R&R (rest and recuperation furlough)
in Tokyo, where he would meet his wife.
He got a lift on a military plane that was
headed to the United States, with a
layover in Tokyo. As an officer, he was
invited to sit in the cockpit with the pilot.
“He told me there were one hundred
soldiers in body bags on the plane. Every
week he flew back to the States with an
average of a hundred KIA [men killed in
action]. I was very grateful to be flying
[alive] to meet my wife for Purim.”
DR. MARTIN BENENSTOCK
Dr. Benenstock (L) on a dental mission with an assistant.
“Hetoldmetherewere
onehundredsoldiersin
bodybagsontheplane.
Everyweekheflewback
totheStateswithan
averageofahundred
KIA.Iwasverygrateful
tobeflying[alive]to
meetmywifeforPurim.”

The waste of human life in that war
has not left Dr. Benenstock’s
consciousness. He speaks at length about
the tragedy of Vietnam — the idealism of
the American troops and the unfounded
belief of its leaders, President Lyndon
Johnson and General William
Westmoreland, that the South
Vietnamese were interested in the
friendship of the United States. Military
intelligence reported to the generals and
the government that the United States
was doing well, but it was not so.
Furthermore, the U.S. did not
recognize the fact that the South
Vietnamese were interested in
being reunited with their
North Vietnamese brethren.
Dr. Benenstock remembers
that American doctors, dentists,
and others were dispatched to the
countryside to dispense medical
and dental care and distribute clothing to
demonstrate the friendship of the
American people.
The proof of this naiveté became
incontrovertible, in his opinion, later on
when President Richard Nixon gave the
South Vietnamese America’s most
sophisticated tanks, armored cars, and
artillery so that it could overpower its
enemy before the Paris Peace Accords
were signed. The president was forced to
take American forces out of Southeast
Asia due to the war’s increasing
unpopularity, but the certainty of a North
Vietnamese victory was clear. Our tragic
misunderstanding of the war-weary
South Vietnamese and their mentality, in
his opinion, and the endurance of the
North Vietnamese resulted in a
staggering human cost, with three times
the number of wounded on top of the
fifty thousand dead.
Dr. Benenstock feels that our country’s
leaders have gone on to repeat the same
mistake by fighting abroad with poor
intelligence in Afghanistan and Iraq at
tremendous human cost. Happy to serve
his country, as were the other Jewish
veterans, he is hurt by the waste of that
effort because he lived through the
tragedy of Vietnam. zIIThe National Museum of American Jewish Military History in Washington, D.C.

final veterans

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