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How the NYPD Helped at Israel's Birth

(New Jersey Jewish Standard) Joanne Palmer - NYPD Patrolman Wolf Silberstein earned the police department's medal of honor in 1934 for "extraordinary heroism" while off duty during a poolroom hold-up by three men with revolvers, killing one of the bandits. Leon Katz, a former New York City policeman, described in 1995 how he put together a group of city cops who had smuggled guns to the Jews in mandatory Palestine as they fought for freedom from the British. Wolf Silberstein was one of those cops. At the time, veterans returning from World War II often brought back guns, both their own and weapons that they took from the enemy as souvenirs. That was illegal, but they were promised that they would not get into any trouble if they turned them in. Those guns were to go back to the army, but many were siphoned off to a warehouse on the Lower East Side and then shipped off to Israel. The police brass knew about it, but they chose to look the other way. They felt sympathy for the Jewish fighters trying against towering odds to make their own state. One day a box that was going onboard a boat fell, and guns fell all over the dock. A foreman called the police, and the policeman he called said, "Don't worry about it." But the shipping company reported it to the FBI. Paul Caine, Silberstein's grandson, said, "The FBI agents were two Irish guys, and when my grandfather heard about it, he and his friends went and intercepted those two agents, and they went to a bar with them, and they drank together, and they bonded on their mutual hatred of Britain. And in the end the Irish gents decided to drop the case."
2017-12-01 00:00:00
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