Rabbi-Chaplains of the Civil War – NYTimes.comhttp://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/rabbi-chaplains-of-the-civil-war/Rabbi Dr. Arnold Fischel arrived at the White House on the morning of Dec. 11, 1861, prepared to act as a one-man lobby for the constitutional rights of Jews. He had traveled alone from New York, on his own dime, bringing several letters of recommendation from prominent Republicans and one from the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, then just three years old and the country’s only national Jewish organization.
One of Abraham Lincoln’s private secretaries told Fischel that there was little chance of a meeting. But the rabbi was persistent, taking his place among hundreds of people hoping to see the president, some of whom had been waiting for three days. To Fischel’s surprise, Lincoln immediately received him with “marked courtesy.” The rabbi stated the reason for his visit: On behalf of the American Jewish community, including several thousand soldiers fighting for the Union, he hoped the president might reconsider a discriminatory law forbidding his people to serve as chaplains.
It was a controversial proposition, and one that had its roots in the very onset of the war. Five months earlier, Lincoln had called a special session of Congress and requested a $400,000,000 budget to fight the Confederacy, a portion of which provided for the inclusion of chaplains in the Volunteer Army. The ink had barely dried on the proposed draft when Representative Clement Vallandigham, a non-Jew, objected to its wording — that a chaplain be a “regularly ordained clergyman of some Christian denomination.”
