Samuel Kramer papers

Samuel Kramer was a New York-based attorney who served as legal counsel to Agudas Chasidei Chabad (A.C.C.) of the United States and Canada, which had its headquarters in Brooklyn, New York. The American branch of Agudas Chasidei Chabad was founded in 1924 by Kramer’s father, Rabbi Moshe Eliezer (Morris L. Kramer), and after his death, his son Chaim Zalman (Hyman) became its president, and another son, Abraham, was its treasurer, and a business partner to his brother, Samuel. The law practice of Samuel Kramer was located on 122 E. 42nd Street in Manhattan, and although he belonged to another synagogue, the Jewish Center of Manhattan, he was known for his support of Chabad. Samuel Kramer was also a veteran who had served in the U.S. Navy during World War I, and had helped found the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA) and the Sons of Israel synagogue in Brooklyn.

With the outbreak of World War II, Samuel, having learned of the plight of the leader of Chabad, Rabbi Josef Isaac (Yosef Yitzhak) Schneersohn, who was trapped in German-occupied Poland, at the Lubavitch Yeshiva Tomchei Temimim in Otwock, near Warsaw, took action to try to secure his escape from Poland. Working with the U.S. State Department, and other intermediaries, as well as colleagues Max Rhoade and Philip Kleinfeld, he was ultimately successful, and through negotiations with German Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, then head of the Abwehr (military intelligence), was able to secure the granting of diplomatic immunity to Rabbi Schneersohn, and his release and transfer to Riga, Latvia, from which he travelled to Paris and arrived in New York in March 1940.

Later in 1940, Kramer was called into action again, this time to try to save the remaining rabbis and students who had been left behind in Otwock. Working with Rabbi Schneersohn’s son-in-law, the Rabbi Shmaryahu (Samorious) Gourary, who had been with Rabbi Schneersohn in Poland and had served as head of Yeshiva Tomchei Temimim, he began contacting various political figures in New York, officials at the State Department, and the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees (headed at that time by James G. McDonald), seeking visas that would enable the students and rabbis to immigrate to the United States. The students who had made it to Vilnius, Lithuania, were able to get transit visas to travel through the Soviet Union to China and Japan, where they waited for visas to travel to the United States. In early 1941, Kramer, Kleinfeld, and others, working with Gourary, set to work to obtain them, and although visas were granted to some of the students, these were later cancelled due to the “close relatives edict,” which prevented refugees who had close relatives living under German occupation from entering the United States. While some of the students obtained visas to travel to Canada, the remainder waited in Japan until the end of World War II.
[Sources: Rigg, Bryan Mark, The Rabbi Saved by Hitler’s Soldiers (University Press of Kansas, 2016); and Out of the Inferno, edited by Rachel Altein and Rabbi Eliezer Y. Zaklikovsky (Brooklyn: Kehot Publication Society, 2002)].