JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

Benoît, Pierre-Marie
though there is now a school named after him in Waukegan
(Jack Benny Junior High School), Benny’s education consisted
of one term at Central High School. He worked in his father’s
haberdashery shop, then at age 16 he got a job playing violin
in the pit of the town’s Barrison Theater. After spending several
years on the road with various partners in piano-violin
duos he joined the Navy, where his talent for stand-up comedy
was revealed. After his naval stint he created a solo vaudeville
act, which ultimately got him noticed by the film industry. In
1928 he appeared in the short film Bright Moments and in 1929
headlined in the films Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Chasing
Rainbows, and in Medicine Man (1930). With this national exposure
in film, Benny became a star.
In 1932 Benny hit the radio waves, featured on his friend
Ed Sullivan’s talk show. Two months later, Benny was the host
of his own radio program. Over the next eight years, he became
one of the biggest names in radio with his weekly halfhour
comedy show. According to Benny, comedy was based on
seven principles: the joke, exaggeration, ridicule, ignorance,
surprise, the pun, and the comic situation. Fine-tuning those
principles as he went along, Benny added a regular cast to his
show. In addition to Rochester and his wife, Mary, they included
Phil Harris, Dennis Day, and Don Wilson.
In 1950 Benny advanced to television. The Jack Benny
Show entertained 18 million viewers for 15 years. Some of the
classic recurring themes were his stinginess, his vanity about
his supposed age of 39, a basement vault where he kept all his
money, and a feigned ineptness at playing the violin. Added to
Benny’s famous pregnant pause and exasperated “Well!” were
a mincing walk, an affected hand to the cheek, and a sustained
look of disbelief when confronted by a problem. During that
time he starred in several films as well: The Big Broadcast of
1937, Buck Benny Rides Again (1940), Love Thy Neighbor (1940),
Charley’s Aunt (1941), To Be or Not to Be (1942), and Who Was
That Lady? (1962). When his TV show ended in 1965, the perennial
39-year-old was 71. But he did not retire from his beloved
show business. He appeared in the films: It’s a Mad, Mad,
Mad, Mad World (1967), A Guide for the Married Man (1967),
and The Man (1972). He returned to NBC once a year to do a
TV special, performed with symphonies, and made numerous
live appearances in theaters in the U.S. and abroad.
Although the character he portrayed on radio and tv was
as miserly as they come, the real Jack Benny was extremely
generous. And at age 60, he began to take violin lessons to
perfect his craft. He played benefit concerts to sell-out audiences
to raise money for musicians and concert halls. In 1961
his benefit concert helped save New York’s Carnegie Hall from
being demolished. In addition, he raised $20,000 for the construction
of a music center near Waukegan, and $838,000 for
a conservatory at the University of Hartford.
In 1974, his final year, he was working on his third TV
Farewell Special for NBC and preparing for his first starring
role in a film in 30 years. He was to co-star with Walter Matthau
in the comedy The Sunshine Boys. However, when the
movie was completed, Benny’s best friend George Burns
played the part in his place. In 1989 Jack Benny was inducted
into the Radio Hall of Fame. With his daughter, Joan, he cowrote
his memoirs, entitled Sunday Nights at Seven, which
was published posthumously in 1990.
Bibliography: I. Fein, Jack Benny: An Intimate Biography
(1976); M. Josefsberg, The Jack Benny Show (1977).
[Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)]
°BENOÎT, PIERRE-MARIE (1895–1990), French priest and
Righteous Among the Nations. Born Pierre Péteul, in Bourg
d’Iré (Marne-et-Loire), France, to a family of flour millers,
Benoît entered the Capuchin-Franciscan order in 1913. After
a tour of duty in the French army during World War I, where
he was wounded, he took up theological studies, earning a
doctorate in theology and teaching at the Capuchin college
in Rome. With Italy’s entry into World War II in June 1940, he
was sent back to France, and took up residence at the Capuchin
convent in Marseilles, at 51 Croix-de-Regnier Street. This
eventually became a beehive of activity to help Jews in flight to
acquire lodgings, identity documents, and baptismal certificates
as well as aid in crossing to Switzerland or Spain. In this
he was coopted by local Jewish and non-Jewish religious and
lay leaders. After the German occupation of the Vichy zone,
in November 1942, Benoît traveled regularly to Nice, then under
Italian occupation. There the Jewish-Italian banker Angelo
Donati introduced Benoît to Guido Lospinoso, the newly appointed
Italian commissioner for Jewish affairs, who agreed to
Benoît’s request to be allowed to continue his rescue activity of
Jews. Fearing a German takeover of the Italian zone, Donati
and Benoît devised a plan to remove the approximately 30,000
Jews there to Italy proper, and for this Benoît went to Rome
to make arrangements. In an audience with Pope Pius XII, on
July 16, 1943, Benoît requested the Vatican’s intercession with
the Italian government to facilitate the transfer plan. In addition,
he asked the Vatican for aid in obtaining news of French
Jews deported to Germany and improvement of the situation
of Jews in French detention camps as well as intervention with
Spain to allow the repatriation of Jews claiming Spanish ancestry.
It is not known if the Vatican acted on these requests.
In the meantime, with the overthrow of Mussolini, on July 25,
1943, the transfer plan was amended to move the Jews by ships
to North African havens. The new Italian government of Marshal
Badoglio was prepared to provide four ships and requisition
trucks, and the U.S.-based Joint to underwrite the cost
of this large-scale operation. Benoît also received support for
this undertaking from Francis Osborne and Myron Taylor, the
British and American diplomatic representatives to the Vatican.
Italy’s surrender to the Allies, however, on September 8,
1943, and the immediate occupation of Italy and its zone in
France by the Germans scuttled this rescue operation. Benoît,
now under the name of Padre Benedetto, worked closely with
Delasem (Delegazione per l’Assistenza dei Emigranti Ebrei),
originally created to deal with facilitating Jewish emigration,
and presently occupied with helping Jews in hiding. Elected to
Delasem’s executive board, when its president Settimio Sorani
370 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3