Books can be surprising things. Sometimes, you pick one up for no good reason, look at it with low expectations, and wind up enjoying the read, and absorbing something that can change your thinking, or can enlarge your worldview. This is the history of the book I finished yesterday, A Jewish Chaplain in France by Rabbi Lee Levinger.

Levinger was born in Burke, Idaho (yes, Burke, Idaho) in 1890 and died in 1966. He was a Reform rabbi, a graduate of Hebrew Union College, and a longtime Hillel director and employee of the Jewish Welfare Board. He also wrote a number of books.

But we can start with Burke, Idaho. Burke, Idaho, is a ghost town. According to Atlas Obscura, it was founded in 1887 (Levinger born only 3 years later), and was basically abandoned by the 1950s. You can visit it today. It is apparently quite picturesque, being situated in a very narrow canyon, which makes it rather unique. As we are planning to drive from Seattle to Glacier National Park in July, it looks like our route will be quite near Burke. Hopefully, we can visit and take a few pictures.

(I read a 1952 article that Levinger wrote in Commentary magazine about Jews in small town America. It was a very interesting article, talking about the spread of Jews throughout the country in small towns, where they started out as merchants, and where many of the next generation became professionals. Had he written the article today, he would have gone on and talked about the generation after that abandoning the small towns. He would not have been critical. Looking at all of this today, it seems inevitable. But his description of Jewish life in these towns, where a minyan might be unavailable, potential Jewish spouses lacking, and traditional Jewish learning minimal, was very interesting. You can find the article by Googling (as I did) “Levinger small towns”.)

But this has little to do with what I want to say today. Today, I want to recommend Levinger’s book about chaplaincy, which was published in 1922, and dealt with his experience in France during the first world war.

The first Jewish chaplains in the military were appointed during the Civil War, both by the Union and by the Confederacy. After the Civil War, it appears there were no Jewish chaplains until the United States entered World War I in April of 1917, and that the first chaplains went overseas in the summer of 1918, just about a half year before the armistice ended that war, and that there were chaplains who stayed in Europe after the armistice until the American forces could all be brought home. Levinger was sent to France in July 1918 and stayed for nine months.

According to the book, there were something over 100,000 Jewish military personnel sent overseas during World War I, out of about 225,000 Jews in the U.S. military. About 3000 were killed, and about 12,000 injured. There were, at the highest, 12 Jewish chaplains with the army in France.

What I learned from this book included the following:

1. Many of the gentiles in the army had never met a Jew, and many of the Jews, particularly those from New York, who made up perhaps 40% of the Jews in the military then, had really never had contact with gentiles.
2. At least 1/3 of the Jewish soldiers in World War I were immigrants, and for most of them English was not their first language. Sometimes, there English was rudimentary.
3. He witnessed virtually no antisemitism in the military during the time he was in France. Jews and gentiles at every level seemed to realize that they were much more the same than different, and came to respect each other.
4. In this regard, the chaplain’s job then, as it is now, is to conduct religious services according to their own religions, but to serve, as chaplains, soldiers of all religions who are looking for guidance or assistance. And in fact, when it is time for a religious service, and no chaplain of a particular religion is available, chaplains will often conduct services for soldiers of different religions.
5. In addition, those who attended religious service often were of different religions. There could be Jewish services where there were more Christians than Jews in attendance.
6. There was enormous amounts of cooperation between chaplains of different religions, as well as with the Jewish Welfare Board, the Y.M.C.A., and the Salvation Army during the war.
7. The Jewish services were most often abbreviated and followed the abridged prayer books sent out by the U.S. government. They were mainly conducted in English, rather than Hebrew, and all Jewish chaplains were generally in agreement on this.
8. The majority of the Jewish soldiers had Orthodox backgrounds, but that same majority were largely not Orthodox themselves. Many, whose parents were as observant as they had been in Europe before coming to America, had not accompanied their fathers to the religious services he attended, and many could not read or understand Hebrew. This was clearly a transition time for many now-American Jewish families.
9. Services conducted by Jewish chaplains often were done in cooperation with local Jewish families or clergy in France, and this, too, was helpful, especially for Jewish families in small-town France, whose structure and lives had been so disrupted by the war.
10. Sermons to soldiers and sermons a rabbi would give to a civilian congregation back in the United States were very different; all chaplains soon realized this. Sermons given to the soldiers often involved back and forth with the soldiers themselves; something that rarely would happen in a synagogue at home.
11. The Jewish Welfare Board did an extraordinary job organizing everything in France at short notice.
12. The general responsibilities of chaplains were what you would think – services, funerals, religious ceremonies such as Pesach seders, visiting the sick, counseling, taking complaints and trying to resolve them. The soldiers were by and large very young. Communications with family back home was often non-existent for months at a time.

All in all, this book has a lot to offer. I found it at a library book sale and bought it for, I think, $2. But it isn’t an unknown book; you can read a lot about it on line. And it seems to be a book very well known to the National Museum of Jewish Military History, here in Washington. It is well written, and it will expand your thinking of the evolution of the American Jewish community in the United States at the time when Jewish immigration into the country remained at its height, but near the end of that time.

Anything missing from the book? Yes. Women. Except for local French Jewish women helping out here and there…..this was clearly a man’s world. If there were any women in the American military in France during the first World War, they never made it into Levinger’s book. Oh, and by the way, this book was not published by a small Jewish press. It was published by Macmillan; I found this also of interest.