The outbreak of war in 1914 was greeted in Liverpool Jewry with a euphoria not unlike that which overtook the wider society. Young Jewish men, many of them fairly recent arrivals in England, flocked to the colours. Many died for their country, including 13 of the 113 volunteers from the Old Hebrew Congregation, Princes Road. Jewish master tailors turned to the manufacture of uniforms for the army in France and Flanders. Women of Princes Road formed a Soldiers Working Party which distributed 8,000 articles of clothing to the needy families of enlisted men; others joined their non-Jewish sisters in an important Merseyside armaments industry now lacking an adequate male work-force. There were protesters, as there were in the wider society - a handful of Russian immigrants unwilling to take up arms on the side of a Tsarist regime which had once persecuted them, idealists like John Harris, dismissed from his post as Senior Reader at Princes Road for his conscientious objection, the young Sidney Silverman, son of a Russian immigrant, subjected to two years in prison for his - but by and large Liverpool Jewry went to war in 1914.
In 1915 official fears of an 'enemy within' produced a Defence of the Realm Act under which non-naturalised Germans, Austrians, Rumanians and Turks became liable to arrest and to internment on the Isle of Man as enemy aliens. Many young leaders of Liverpool Jewry found themselves temporarily behind barbed wire. The Liverpool Jewish Board of Guardians sent regular food parcels to Jewish internees, while pressure for their release, in the end successful, was applied by a 'Communal Council for the safeguard of Jewish interests in Liverpool', a short lived precursor of the Merseyside Representative Council.
During the war years, Zionism moved decisively from visionary ideal to practical possibility. The Russian Revolution and the entry of Turkey into the war on the side of Germany shifted the centre of gravity of world Zionism to Britain, under whose 'mandate' Palestine would fall in the event of an allied victory. English Zionism geared itself far action. Liverpool's Manny Fagin was amongst the founders of the Junior Zionist Organisation of Great Britain and Ireland (now the Federation of Zionist Youth) in 1916 and became its first president. Finally, Weizmann's forceful negotiations led in December 1917 to the Balfour Declaration, by which the British Government committed itself to support the creation of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine. 1917 was the decisive year in Liverpool Jewry's growing commitment to the Zionist cause. Even the cautious Samuel Frampton embraced a Herzlian Zionism now far from 'chimerical'. A motion put to Princes Road members in 1917 that the foundation of a Jewish State would 'prejudicially affect the position of such Jews as are members of the British nation' was defeated, if only by 39 votes to 30. Support was more wholehearted in the immigrant synagogues as a vast majority of Liverpool Jews now fell in behind the effort to secure the support and raise the funds which would make the promise of the Balfour Declaration a reality.
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