Members of the Capital District Council of JWV raised a glass of “L’chaim and Slainte” on Sunday, March 16, to honor and remember “Blaustein of the Irish” for  Saint Patrick’s Day.

Sergeant Abraham Blaustein was a Jewish World War I soldier who served in the New York National Guard’s 69th Infantry Regiment, an Irish regiment known as the “Fighting 69th” from its Civil War service in the Irish Brigade.

Blaustein, an engineer assigned to the regimental headquarters, deployed to France with the reflagged 165th Infantry Regiment during World War I, earning his nickname due to heroic actions alongside predominantly Irish American soldiers, particularly during a rescue effort after a German artillery barrage on March 7, 1918, where he received the French Croix de Guerre for his leadership during the rescue efforts.

The regimental chaplain, New York City’s famous Father Duffy, estimated that there were three or four score of Jewish members of the regiment when it deployed. By the time the unit fought in the Argonne in the fall of 1918, all three battalion adjutants in the regiment were Jewish officers, he noted.

Those joining the regiment, like Blaustein, were embraced as “Irish by adoption, Irish by association, or Irish by conviction,” Duffy would say.