JEWISH WORLD

16 JEWISH WORLD • AUGUST 11-17, 2023 ny, heard through the underground of their old friends who’d fled to various countries of Europe, two things. One was that there had been a secret meeting of German physi- cists in Berlin and [the other] that Germany had, quite suddenly and secretly, forbidden all exports of a certain kind of ore from the occu- pied country of Czechoslovakia.” The ”ore” was uranium. The two scientists understood the relationship between these two events, but they wondered whether “the American State Department had any notion what the coincidence of these two items could signify.” They were also conscious, however, that they lacked the clout to do anything about it on their own. In Cooke’s words, they feared being “waved ler and the Nazis did, but he came to regret it a few years later. As he wrote in his 1950 book “Out of My Later Years,” had he known “the Germans would not succeed in constructing the atom bomb, I nev- er would have moved a finger.” The two-page letter is on display at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presi- dential Library, next to what was FDR’s home, in upstate Hyde Park, which is where I first saw it as a boy on a family trip. Einstein’s summer address was written on its upper right corner: “Albert Einstein, Old Grove Road, Nassau Point, Peconic, Long Is- continued on page 18 By KARL GROSSMAN O ppenheimer,” the movie about J. Robert Oppen- heimer and the Manhat- tan Project, is a great film, extraordi- nary, as most reviews agree, and so very important for us in our time, es- pecially considering the veiled threats from Russian President Vladimir Pu- tin and the extremist regime in Iran. The Manhattan Project got its name because its initial headquar- ters in 1942 was in Manhattan at the North Atlantic Division of the FILM U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It began with a letter from Long Is- land to President Franklin D. Roos- evelt. It was signed by Albert Ein- stein who spent summers in New Suffolk on Long Island. It was 1939, a year after the split- ting of the atom by scientists in Nazi Germany. Wrote Einstein to FDR: “This phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable— though much less certain—that ex- tremely powerful bombs of this type may thus be constructed.” Einstein wanted America to cre- ate an atom bomb before Adolf Hit- land, August 2nd, 1939.” (Nassau Point is seven air miles from where my wife and I have lived for nearly 50 years, a hamlet on the South Fork of Long Island called Noyac across Little Peconic Bay from New Suffolk.) In 2010, the late British journalist Alistair Cooke (who incidentally had a home in Cutchogue on the North Fork) recounted the amazing story of the origin of the letter on his BBC “Letter fromAmerica” program. “Well, it began, on a drenching hot day in midsummer 1939 with two men, two refugees getting up in the morning and getting out a map and deciding to drive to the end of Long Island,” Cooke relat- ed. He said these “these two refu- gees, both Hungarians who had been run out of their labs in Germa- Einstein wrote a letter to FDR to warn him of Germany’s race for the atomic bomb. This led to the U.S. joining the race. The rst page of Albert Einstein’s historic 1939 letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. ‘Oppenheimer’: A Film For Today A letter from Long Island started it all “ HOWDID ANUNKNOWN JEWISHDJ FROMOHIO CHANGE THEWORLD FOREVER? STARRING CONSTANTINEMAROULIS AND JOEPANTOLIANO RockAndRollManTheMusical.com NEWWORLDSTAGES 340W. 50TH ST.