[1][2] The Bergson Group was initially composed of ten Irgun activists from Europe, America and Palestine, including Aryeh Ben-Eliezer, Yitzhak Ben-Ami, Alexander Rafaeli, Shmuel Merlin, and Eri Jabotinsky, and was closely involved with Jewish and Zionist advocacy groups, such as the American Friends for a Jewish Palestine and the Organizing Committee of Illegal Immigration.
[3][4] As information about the Holocaust began to reach the United States, Kook's Bergson Group shifted efforts from trying to create a Jewish army to rescuing Jews in Europe.
On March 9, 1943, the Group produced a huge pageant in Madison Square Garden written by Ben Hecht, titled "We Will Never Die", in memory of the 2,000,000 European Jews who the Nazis had already murdered in the ongoing Holocaust.
The performance was seen by forty thousand people its first night, and it travelled to five other cities including Washington, D.C., where First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, six Supreme Court Justices, and some 300 senators and congressmen watched it.
[3] After the creation of the Monuments Men to save European art in June 1943, at a time when the Roosevelt Administration was rejecting calls to save Jews who were being exterminated on an industrial scale by the Nazis, the Bergson Group took out full page ads the New York Times questioning the Roosevelt administration’s priorities.