Before After
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BEFORE AFTER In 1962, faced with a resurgent fascist movement, young Jewish men and women came together to oppose them. Through the 1962 Committee (62 Group), the enemy met their match. Over time, the fighting and intelligence skills of the 62 Group became legendary and remain an inspiration to anti-fascists and the Jewish community today. This is the story of the 62 Group’s war against fascism as told by those who were involved at the time. Searchlight July 2002 11 By Steve Silver he first half of the 1950s was a quiet time for anti- SPECIAL fascists, with the immediate postwar threat of a FEATURE fascist revival gone. Britain’s prewar fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, failed to make his much vaunted The62Gro comeback and, with little to oppose, the anti- Tfascist movement faded into the background. Mosley remained in exile abroad while a small group of die-hard loyalists, led by Raven Thompson, Alf Flockhart and Jeffrey Hamm, kept his organisation, Union Movement, alive. The most militant of the anti-fascist organisations, the 43 Group, was dissolved in 1950 and the set piece anti-fascis street battles between fascists and anti-fascists soon The activities of the 62 Group resurrected the old seemed to belong to a bygone era. defence debate about the best way to fight antisemitism, Then in the mid-1950s the fascists began to rebuild their with the Board of Deputies’ Jewish Defence Committee organisations and by the early 1960s Britain was in the publicly frowning on the gung-ho activities of the Jewish midst of a fascist revival. Most of their activities were anti-fascists. However, nothing could prevent the centred in London and therefore so was the anti-fascist popular support that the 62 Group enjoyed among response. London was also the place where most of ordinary Jews. It left an indelible mark on Jewish defence Britain’s Jews lived and the anti-fascist opposition came in Britain and contributed significantly to winning the in its most militant form from a section of the Jewish wider Jewish community to expect communal defence to community who formed the 1962 Committee, or 62 Group be conducted in an open and vigorous way. as it was popularly known. In some ways the 62 Group was similar to the 43 Group. From anti-fascism to anti-imperialism: Below However, the Britain of the 1960s was a very different The changing orientation of the left Colin Jordan place to Britain at the end of the Second World War, and During the early 1950s anti-fascism ceased to be the at BNP rally consequently the composition of the new group was major activity for the left as it had been throughout May 1960 different. While, historically, the anti-fascist movement the 1930s and 1940s. Mainly this was because the fascists had always been led by the left, its influence in the Jewish were so small that it was not worth fighting them, but Centre community was beginning to wane so the 62 Group was also the left was prioritising other struggles. Averil Walters, not left-led in the same way that the 43 Group had been. It was now engaged in supporting the huge anti- League of While the two organisations had some members in imperialist movements in Africa and Asia, their activities Empire common, a new generation was becoming involved. led by the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF). Loyalists The two main players in the wider anti-fascist movement Newer groups from different political traditions, such as activist, being remained the left and the Jewish community, but the Socialist Labour League and anarchists, were ejected from international events and demographic shifts changed the beginning to emerge too and by the end of the 1950s Tory rally nature of London’s Jewish community in particular. they were gaining some influence. Searchlight July 2002 12 up:Jewish sm revived However the traditional left was still the dominant force leading the anti-imperialist movement in the 1950s and early 1960s, though support for colonial freedom attracted people outside the left as well and had support from liberals and even some conservatives. They supported the great freedom struggles of the peoples of such places as the Congo, Ghana and Kenya. Led by So, the left did not abandon anti-fascism – in fact out Racist hate Fenner Brockway, a veteran Labour MP, one of the main of self-preservation the left had to defend itself – it was aimed at campaigns of the MCF was against the new system of just not a major campaigning issue throughout the anti-apartheid apartheid that had been introduced in South Africa. 1950s and crucially they did not offer leadership in protesters The fascists supported imperialism of both the British opposing it in the early 1960s. and the foreign varieties and held provocations and counter-demonstrations against the left’s activities. In Britain’s Jewish community changes: 1960 Mosley’s Union Movement, joined by the newly the decline of the Jewish East End formed British National Party (not the same Throughout the early part of the 1950s fascism was not organisation as today’s BNP), turned up at a rally in a major concern to the Jewish community either. Trafalgar Square protesting against the Sharpsville Great changes were taking place in the composition Massacre. Stewards from the MCF and the newly formed of the Jewish community during this period. Jews in Anti-Apartheid Movement saw off the fascists. the East End of London, where most of the great The brutal murder and torture in 1961 of the Congolese battles with the fascists had taken place previously, anti-imperialist leader Patrice Lumumba led to riots in and where most Jews lived, began moving out London in which fascists attacked the anti-imperialists, through a northwest “corridor” via Stamford Hill and but there too they were beaten back. Hackney towards Golders Green or further east The other big issue for the left – in the climate of Cold into areas such as Ilford in Essex. War and what seemed like the very real threat of nuclear The 1950s also witnessed a decline in war – was building the huge peace movement and the support among Jewish people for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). The first of Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), the famous London to Aldermaston anti-nuclear which had previously played a leading role marches, in 1958, was led by Pastor Martin Niemoeller, in the fight against fascism. While the Cold who had been imprisoned by the Nazis and famously War was never to reach the heights of the wrote the anti-fascist poem that opened: “First they anti-communist hysteria in the USA, came for the communists, but I did not speak out these were bad times for communists and because I was not a communist.” Fascists from the even worse times for Jewish communists. League of Empire Loyalists drove a car bedecked with The CPGB in east London faced a Union flags into the side of that march in a publicity situation in which its base was moving stunt typical of the modus operandi of the organisation. away from it both physically and After some time on the defensive at successive politically. The Jewish CPGB MP for meetings, MCF stewards on at least one occasion gave Stepney, Phil Piratin, lost his seat in 1950 and the fascists a severe beating. in May 1953 the Communists lost every one of the nine new Stepney Borough Council seats that they had won in 1949. The revelations of February 1956 struck a particularly hard blow against the Jewish communists, many of whom had been stalwarts of the anti-fascist movement. At the twentieth congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev sent shockwaves through the international communist movement when he described the crimes of the Stalin regime. The revelations were of particular concern to Andrew Fountaine Jewish communists because they in his role aof BNP included a whole series of president 1960 antisemitic acts, such as the wholesale purges of Jewish party leaders in the socialist countries of Searchlight July 2002 13 Eastern Europe, the general shutdown of Jewish cultural institutions in the Soviet Union after 1948, the murder in August 1952 of Jewish SPECIAL writers and intellectuals, among them the FEATURE leaders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and the “Doctors’ Plot” of 1953, in which Stalin accused a group of mainly Jewish physicians of plotting to murder him on behalf of “Zionism” and “western imperialism”. As if that were not enough, a matter of months after these revelations, further reverberations followed the Hungarian uprising against that country’s communist leadership and the Soviet Union’s response of sending in tanks to crush it. While no single factor can be seen as decisive in the demise of the relationship between the CPGB and the Jewish working class, the fact is that within a decade the party had gone from a position of ideological hegemony among Jewish people to becoming a relatively marginal force. national activities organiser Martin Webster also What increasingly began to influence Jewish people involved). The League of Empire Loyalists, led by A K was literature on the Holocaust and the success of the Chesterton (cousin of the famous writer G K Chesterton) relatively new state of Israel. Perhaps surprisingly, until also continued to organise. the early 1960s there had been very little literature on The fascists played a central role in the “race riots” in the annihilation of European Jewry by the Nazis. Then in the Notting Hill area of west London (Notting Dale), the early 1960s these events began to be written about where they had a headquarters, and elsewhere now that extensively.