Tibor Rubin

Tibor "Ted" Rubin (born June 18, 1929) is a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor who emigrated to the United States in 1948 and received the Medal of Honor for his valorous actions during the Korean War as a U.S. Infantry soldier and POW from President George W. Bush on September 23, 2005. Rubin is a resident of Garden Grove, California.

Rubin was repeatedly nominated for various military decorations, but was overlooked because of antisemitism by a superior: according to the Washington Post, "in affidavits filed in support of Rubin's nomination for the Medal of Honor, fellow soldiers said Rubin's sergeant was an anti-Semite who gave Rubin dangerous assignments in the hope of getting him killed".

Childhood in Hungary
Rubin was born in Pásztó, a Hungarian town with a Jewish population of 120 families, the son of a shoemaker and one of six children. At age 13, he was transported to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria and liberated two years later by American combat troops. Both his parents and two of his sisters perished in the Holocaust.

Emigration to the United States
Rubin came to the United States in 1948, settled in New York and worked first as a shoemaker and then as a butcher.

In 1949, he tried to enlist in the U.S. Army, for him a shortcut to citizenship and the chance to attend the U.S. Army’s butcher school in Chicago. Knowing little English, he failed the English language test, but tried again in 1950 and passed with some judicious help from two fellow test-takers.

Antisemitism in the army
By July 1950, Private First Class Rubin found himself fighting in South Korea with I Company, Eighth Cavalry Regiment, First Cavalry Division. According to lengthy affidavits submitted by nearly a dozen men who served with Rubin in South and North Korea, mostly self-described "country boys" from the South and Midwest, an antisemitic army sergeant consistently "volunteered" Rubin for the most dangerous patrols and missions.

During one mission, according to the testimonies of his comrades, Rubin secured a needed route of retreat for his rifle company by single-handedly defending a hill for 24 hours against waves of North Korean soldiers. For this and other acts of bravery, Rubin was recommended four times for the Medal of Honor by two of his commanding officers. Both of these officers were killed in action shortly afterwards, but not before ordering Rubin's sergeant to begin the necessary paperwork recommending Rubin for the Medal of Honor. Some of Rubin’s fellow GIs were present and witnessed when the order was issued to the sergeant, and all are convinced that the sergeant deliberately ignored the orders. "I really believe, in my heart, that [the sergeant] would have jeopardized his own safety rather than assist in any way whatsoever in the awarding of the Medal of Honor to a person of Jewish descent", wrote Corporal Harold Speakman in a notarized affidavit.

Chinese POW camp
Toward the end of October 1950, massive Chinese troop concentrations had crossed the border into North Korea attacked and were attacking the unprepared American troops now trapped way inside North Korea. Most of Rubin's regiment had been killed or captured. Rubin, severely wounded, was captured and spent the next 30 months in a prisoner of war camp.

Faced with constant hunger, filth, and disease, most of the GIs simply gave up. "No one wanted to help anyone. Everybody was for himself", wrote Leo A. Cormier Jr., a former sergeant and POW. The exception was Rubin. Almost every evening, Rubin would sneak out of the prison camp to steal food from the Chinese and North Korean supply depots, knowing that he would be shot if caught. "He shared the food evenly among the GIs," Cormier wrote. He also took care of us, nursed us, carried us to the latrine..., he did many good deeds, which he told us were mitzvahs in the Jewish tradition... he was a very religious Jew and helping his fellow men was the most important thing to him". The survivors of the prison war camp credited Rubin with keeping them alive and saving at least 40 American soldiers.

Rubin refused his captors' repeated offers of repatriation to Hungary, by then behind the Iron Curtain.

Jewish veterans
The Jewish War Veterans Act (officially the Leonard Kravitz Jewish War Veterans Act of 2001, after another Jewish Army veteran in the Korean War, and uncle and namesake of Lenny Kravitz) established a review of Medal of Honor nominations for servicemen of the Jewish faith or extraction whose nominations may have been derailed because of antisemitism.