jewishvirtuallibrary:

Footage of the Rabbis’ March on Washington, D.C.; 1943.

Two days before Yom Kippur in 1943, 400 Rabbis met at Union Station and, accompanied by Jewish veterans, marched on the White House to demand American action on the Holocaust.  The march was organized by

Hillel Kook; nephew of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the former Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem.  Hillel was able to use his family connections and his Yiddish to politically organize hundreds of Rabbis, many of them recent immigrants themselves who did not speak English well, to participate in the march. 

Although President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in the White House at the time of the march, he snuck out of a side entrance rather than confront the Rabbis.  This was interpreted as a snub by much of the press, with the Jewish Daily Forward saying, “Would a similar delegation of 500 Catholic priests have been thus treated?”  It was due to this march that Congress was pushed to create the War Refugee Board, which saved thousands of Jewish people in the final years of World War II.