I was bothering my long-suffering brother with an infodump of some of my recently acquired Antarctic history trivia when he interrupted me with an interesting question. “Were there any Jews in Antarctica?”
Considering polar exploration through the lens of the classic query, “But is it good for the Jews?” logically results in an answer of “definitely not.” As I told my brother, “No, because you can’t open a store there.” I then had a terrific 30 seconds or so imagining a world in which there was a store, a world in which Captain Oates stumbles out of the polar party’s tent on the Barrier and right into Meyer’s Dry Goods, conveniently 11 miles from One Ton, and is plied with chicken soup and knishes. “What kind of a meshuggeneh doesn’t put on his shoes before going out for a leak, nu?”
Jews in the North are slightly more common than Jews in the South. In fiction, there is of course Michael Chabon’s classic of Jewish polar literature, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, positing an alternate history in which the Jewish state was founded in Sitka, Alaska. And there’s also Mordecai Richler’s compelling comic saga Solomon Gursky Was Here, which imagines a Canadian Jewish dynasty descended from stowaway survivors of the lost Franklin expedition.
Up through 1934 only seven Jews, according to a syndicated article by Gregory Blattman, had made it to the Arctic in real life. Emil Bessels, the shifty surgeon who may or may not have murdered expedition leader Charles Francis Hall with arsenic on the Polaris expedition, was by all accounts the first. Edward Israel, an astronomer from Michigan who perished on the ill-fated 1881 Greely expedition, was the second.
Angelo Heilprin, a naturalist, led the scientific side of Peary’s 1891 expedition to Greenland. Then there was Rudolph Samoylovich, the founder of the Russian Arctic Institute. He took part in multiple expeditions, including a rescue attempt after the crash of Umberto Nobile’s airship Italia in 1928 (during which the Italian Jewish physicist Aldo Pontremoli had perished). A lifelong revolutionary, the inevitable happened and Samoylovich was arrested and shot in 1939.
Greenblatt’s article also highlights the contributions of Boris Mogilewitch, the sole casualty of the sinking of the Russian icebreaker Chelyuskin, and Arthur C. Blumberg, the electrician’s mate of the Nautilus, a submarine which unsuccessfully tried to reach the North Pole via an underwater route. Another source names two other Jews, Harry Rothschild and Isaac Schlossberg, as also present on the Nautilus.
But who was the first Jew in Antarctica? The answer was not hard to find. Master Sergeant Benjamin “Benny” Roth, of the US Army, accompanied Admiral Richard Byrd on his first Antarctic expedition of 1928. Born in the Lower East Side and orphaned young, Roth found success in the Army as a talented airplane mechanic, and served in World War I. When Byrd put out the word that he was going to attempt a flight over the South Pole and needed the best mechanic for the job, he was directed right to the diminutive and “typically Jewish-looking” Roth, who was so eager to go he extended his Army enlistment for 3 years in order to take the gig.
On Byrd’s expedition Roth’s most notable exploit was surviving a near-drowning, when the section of the Barrier edge he was patrolling collapsed under him and he was plunged into the ocean. (This was fortuitously caught on camera by the expedition’s cinematographers.) Admiral Byrd risked his own life jumping in to help get Roth out alive, and for good reason. Roth was an indispensable asset, ensuring that no mechanical trouble got in the way of Byrd’s attempt on the South Pole. Thanks at least in part to the successfully-rescued Roth’s expertise in air-cooled motors, the Floyd Bennett was able to make it to the Pole and back in November 1929.
While not an Orthodox Jew, Roth nevertheless brought with him to Antarctica a tallis, tefillin, tzitzit, and a siddur, all given to him by his brother. During the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur that he spent on the ice, he recited prayers alone in his cabin. Returning home, he was promoted and decorated with the Soldiers’ Medal for his bravery and conduct. He was also commemorated with his own Antarctic mountain, which hopefully made up a bit for all the anti-Semitic jokes that were lobbed at him constantly throughout the expedition.1
Roth was the first, but he wasn’t the last. I’m pretty sure that many more enlisted Jews probably made it to Antarctica during the period of America’s heaviest military involvement on the continent, beginning with Operation High Jump in 1946, and continuing through the International Geophysical Year in 1957, when permanent bases were established.
And these days, Jewish holidays are celebrated occasionally in Antarctica, mainly dependent on the wherewithal of members of the fluctuating Jewish community to organize services and gatherings. In 1995, environmental scientist David Hornstein observed Passover at Scott Base, opening the door for Elijah in temperatures far below zero, letting in ghostly sheets of white mist. Candles aren’t generally allowed to be lit at McMurdo, but Jews have gotten away with religious exceptions for Shabbat and Hanukkah (with a fire marshal present).
It’s no dry goods store out on the Great Ice Barrier—but it’s not nothing! If anyone would like to help me get to Antarctica so I can be the first to sing some Debbie Friedman down there, please get in touch.
Banger of the week
Laurie Gwen Shapiro, The Stowaway, p. 101