On the 24th of Av, HTC remembers U.S. Army Chaplain and HTC Musmach, Chaplain Rabbi Irving Tepper. Chaplain Tepper served on the front lines in every major campaign in the European theater and was killed in action near the Le Gast region in Normandy, France, on August 13, 1944.
Born to Herman and Mollie Tepper on December 15, 1912, Irving grew up and went to school in Chicago, studying at the Crane High School and graduating from the central YMCA college with a BA in 1935 and received his Semicha from HTC in 1939. Rabbi Tepper became the librarian at HTC and the editor of the student publication “Hamayon.” He taught at the High School of Jewish studies for Girls in 1941 and 1942. Chaplain Tepper was close friends with HTC’s Dean of Students, Rabbi Norman Frimer.
Chaplain Tepper trained at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, and was assigned to the 2nd Battalion of the 60th Infantry, in the Ninth Division. He was small, 5’6, and slender, but an officer described him lovingly as “a frail bundle of enthusiasm, 120 lbs. dripping wet.” He bravely held his head, and his spirits, high through some of the war’s most brutal battles. He was among the first wave to land under fire in Morocco on November 8, 1942, and he and his battalion saw action in Tunisia and Sicily. They were among the first to land in France on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Always at the side of his soldiers wherever they went, Chaplain Tepper was loved and respected for his insistence on sharing the doughboy’s hardships, and his undying smile. He would run alongside his men for miles long hikes, refusing any sort of transport, just to endure the brutal trudge with the other soldiers.
“He didn’t drink or play cards, and he’d come around when the boys were shooting craps and kid the bejeezus out of them, but you had to say he was one of the boys. Nobody ever felt embarrassed with him around, you know, like with some kind of angelic characters. He was nervy, half the time you couldn’t make him wear his helmet. In Port Lyautey when he was holding a burial service the Heinies were sniping from the next hill but that never bothered him, he only wore his skullcap and said they were poor marksmen anyway. You know, he built that first cemetery in Africa, Port Lyautey, he practically had to blast it out of the rocks. It’s a beautiful place. All the boys remember the job he did there, because that was our first dead, and the way he took care of them made the boys feel better.” - Unnamed Army Major
Chaplain Tepper never allowed artillery fire or mortar to interfere with his tefilos (prayers). “No German is going to prevent me from davening my three times daily, 88s or no 88s,” he wrote from Africa. In the same letter, addressed to the Committee on Army and Navy Religious Activities of the National Jewish Welfare Board, Chaplain Tepper described the equipment he marched with. He carried the Jewish chaplains’ guidon and flag on his shoulder, and in his belt, he always had some JWB (Jewish Welfare Board) prayer books, songbooks, and calendars. “These were my rifle and ammunition,” he wrote.
“I’ll never forget the day we were going in column formation through those woods in Sicily. That German patrol started cutting into us and the boys started dropping. Tepper kept right on talking, telling stories.” - Pat Hoey, Soldier
Once as a prank, Chaplain Tepper taught his non-Jewish roommate the song, Adon Olam, and brought him to a Purim service, placing his friend beside the rabbi under the cover of being a Jew from the Bronx. He revealed the truth afterward, to much laughter from the other members of the service. The constant smile of the chaplain couldn’t help but infect the other members of his squad, and the small soldier couldn’t help but smile. Always ready with a quip, the chaplain rabbi could give as well as he could take.
When he couldn’t secure a burial detail, he would dig graves for his men himself, often placing himself in harm's way to recover a body or dig a grave for members of his battalion. The brotherhood and respect he had for his men was unparalleled. “He was offered a chaplain job on corps level, and he turned it down because he wanted to stay at the front with the boys.” (Morris Olander, Soldier and Assistant to Tepper) “The time at Cefalu, when we got that five-gallon tin and filled it full of vermouth, and along comes inspection. The chaplain stuck the tin under his cot for us, but they found it anyway. So what does he do, he says it’s sacramental wine!” - Pat Hoey, Soldier
“I remember now, I remember one time when I think he had the most guts of all. That was right after we landed in Port Lyautey, when we lost all those seventy-six men in landing, our first dead, seventy-six men, that was pretty rough, and we were having a memorial service for them on the shore. We didn’t have any bugle there to blow taps. And nobody could figure out how to do it. Then Chaplain Tepper said all right, he would sing the taps, and he got up there in front of the whole crowd, the whole thousand men. That took nerve. You know he was a little guy, the chaplain, and his voice cracked. But there was not a smile in the crowd, and he went right through with it to the end. That’s how I remember the chaplain. Standing up there and singing the taps, because it was something the boys had to have.” - Morris Olander, Soldier and Assistant to Tepper
“I never knew Tepper was a Jewish chaplain for a long time. He was just the chaplain.” - Sergeant Milton Westfal
Chaplain Tepper wrote in his last letter to the National Jewish Welfare Board: “Greetings from a liberated area in France. Since the newspapers have carried my division’s exploits, you are no doubt familiar with recent doings. Nothing spectacular except doing chaplain’s work up at the front beside getting some real scares and ducking 88s and other objects, which, Thank God, did not have my address on them.”
On August 11, 1944, while running into houses and shelters to warn his men of incoming bombs, a bomb dropped from a German plane and exploded beside Chaplain Tepper. Twenty-two pieces of shrapnel went into him. He would not have been there if he had not been saving lives. For nearly two days Chaplain Tepper fought to live, before passing away in a field hospital. He was buried in Waldheim Cemetery, decorated by the British government and holding the Purple Heart. He is recognized on Chaplains Hill at Arlington National Cemetery in a memorial dedicated to 14 Jewish Chaplains who were killed in service of their country.
“..as often as I can I say kaddish for my friend. No doubt you have already activated something with which to commemorate one of the most saintly souls to ever have passed through the portals of our yeshivah. Of him it can be said that he died “al kiddush Hashem.” I pray that ere I leave to return home I shall be able to say a prayer at his grave” – Chaplain Sydney Mossman in a letter to the dean, Rabbi Jacob Greenberg
“They were with Eisenhower when he led the ranks in the invasion into Nazi Europe, and from the ranks there fell in battle the heroic and very dedicated chaplain Yitzchak Tepper. He volunteered from his Rockford pulpit to serve on the battlefields of North Africa and Italy until the soil of France finally received him.” - Rabbi Harold P. Smith (HTC Journal, 1972)
コメント