Shmuel Merlin
Country:
Bessarabia
Company:
Government
Samuel Merlin, author of Millions of Jews to Rescue, was a member of the
Irgun Zvai Leumi (the National Military Organization or Irgun) - the right-wing "Revisio- nist" underground associated with Zeev Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin.
Merlin labored for decades on what, as an actual Bergson Group participant,
must have been an emotionally difficult task. Although he succeeded in writing one
other book for publication in 1969 (The Search for Peace in the Middle East), this
second book was not published until 2011, fifteen years after his death. Ably edited
and annotated by Dr. Rafael Medoff, ti is the author's account of the Bergson Boys
led by Hillel Kook - better known by his alias, Peter Bergson. Bergson and his com-
rades, all veterans of the Irgun in their twenties and thirties, first came to the US from
Palestine to agitate for a Jewish army, but later achieved fame rallying American
opinion for the rescue of Europe's Jews from Hitler's genocide. The initial objective of
the Bergson Boys - Bergson, Merlin, Eri Jabotinsky (son of the founder of Revisionist
Zionism), Alex Rafaeli, and Yitzhak Ben-Ami (father of JStreet's president, Jeremy
Ben-Ami) - the creation of an army of "Palestinian and stateless Jews" to fight Hitler, merits further exploration. Merlin states that 133,000 to 135,000 Palestinian Jews had
volunteered to fight, but the service ofmost was refused because of the British insis- tence that Palestinian Arabs ion on the basis ofone-to-one parity.