Notably among the periodicals that published items about the Jewish Brigade was The Jewish Chronicle. Throughout the years (yes, literally, years) well before the Brigade’s actual establishment on 20 September 1944, the Chronicle featured stories, essays, editorials, and readers’ letters pertaining to the establishment of a Jewish fighting unit. These wide-ranging items covered discussion, debate, and political wrangling – within, between, and beyond the British Government and military; within the Jewish communities of Britain and the Yishuv – about the concept and practicality of Jewish fighting unit, in the first place. This material focused on the relevance and need for a relatively (numerically) small Jewish fighting unit in terms of the context of Britain’s overall war effort, and especially, the symbolic implication for the self-perception and identity of the Jewish people in terms of fielding a specifically and intentionally Jewish military formation in the European Theater of War, given that the animating ethos of Germany’s war in Europe (and potentially beyond…) was fundamentally a war against the Jews.
In a larger and more abstract sense, during the early years of the Second World War, a number of essays and opinion pieces appeared in organs of the Jewish press – and some in the general news media? – pertaining to the establishment of a independent large-scale Jewish fighting force which would fight alongside and in cooperation with the existing military forces of the Allied nations. Though moving, fascinating, and tragically fanciful (if inspiring) in retrospect, these arguments and proposals were essentially based on Jewish demographics alone, rather than the daunting and probably insurmountable hurdles – of organization, transportation, training, access to and provision with weapons, and above all questions of citizenship and identity (national identity, and, Jewish self identity) – that existed in the world of 1939.
In any event, on November 3, 1944, less than two months after the Jewish Brigade’s creation, the Chronicle ran a news item illustrating the Brigade’s newly created shoulder insignia.
The text of this article appears below, while an image of the original news item itself (a digital photo of the article as it appeared in the view-screen of a mechanical 35mm microfilm reader at the New York Public Library) is shown at the “bottom” of this post. For the illustration of the Brigade insignia in the original article, I’ve substituted a image of an actual flag insignia and shoulder flash, which I found at Rabbi Binyamin Yablok’s Virtual Jewish Museum. An image of a recruiting placard for the Brigade, also from the Virtual Jewish Museum, appears below the text.
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JEWISH BRIGADE “FLASH”
Distinctive Insignia Chosen
The Jewish Chronicle
November 3, 1944
The illustration reproduced herewith shows the shoulder flash that has been authorized by the War Office for wear by the members of the new Jewish Brigade Group. The name bar is in white on a khaki background, and bears the letters חי”ל which, themselves forming the Hebrew word for “soldier,” are in addition the initial letters of the phrase חטיבה יחודית לוחמת (Chativa Yehudit Lochemet – Jewish Fighting Formation).
The shoulder flash is in the colours blue, white, and blue, with a Magen David in the centre of gold.
The Jewish Agency for Palestine has been informed that the design it submitted for the flag of the Jewish Brigade Group has been officially approved. The flag has two horizontal blue stripes on a white ground, with a blue Shield of David in the centre.
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Original article in The Jewish Chronicle, as 35mm microfilm. (Kinda fuzzy.)
Reference