ROLAND GITTELSOHN, born in 1910 in Cleveland, received a bachelor's degree from Western Reserve University and was ordained at the Hebrew Union College in 1936. Immediately thereafter he began to serve as rabbi of Central Synagogue in Rockville Centre, Long Island. He would remain there until 1953, when he moved to Temple Israel of Boston. For a summary of the rest of Gittelsohn's rabbinic and preaching career, see the introduction to Chapter 31 below.

Like many other rabbis and Christian clergy educated and trained in the 1920s and 1930s, Gittelsohn identified himself during his Long Island years as a pacifist. ‘I read avidly every pacifist tome I could find’, he later wrote, ‘and argued the position with zeal.’ In a sermon delivered ‘early in World War II, after Hitler's massive initial victories’, he said (or ‘shouted’ as he later reported), ‘If we do nothing else, we must stay out of this war … I hate Hitler and want desperately to see him defeated, [but] I want us to stay out of the war even if he seems to be winning.’ In the following two years of the war, he went through the anguishing transformation of abandoning this strongly held and publicly defended position. In late 1942 he applied for a commission in the navy, and on 1 July 1943, taking a voluntary leave of absence from his congregation, he began a programme of chaplaincy training. Assigned to the Fifth Marine Division, he participated in the Iwo Jima invasion. Chosen by his commanding officer to deliver the address at the dedication of the American military cemetery on Iwo Jima, he offered to withdraw because of the opposition by other American chaplains to a rabbi preaching at a service primarily for Christians, and instead spoke at an alternative ceremony. The address, which received wide publicity at the time, would become a subject of Sermon 31b below, delivered twenty years later.

Various texts of the sermon are available on the internet, perhaps reflecting abbreviated versions published at the time. It is interesting to compare the full, authentic version with the considerably shorter version on the website of the US Army Chaplain Center and School.