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Letters They Wouldn't Publish
April 11, 2004
Letters to the editor Natalie Dohrmann, Executive Editor Jewish Quarterly Review dohrmann@sas.upenn.edu To the editor: William D. Rubinstein (JQR, 94:1) asserts that "after the outbreak of the Second World War rescue [of European Jews] was impossible since Jews under Nazism were no longer refugees but prisoners of Hitler." The experiences of my grandfather, the late Rabbi Louis I. Newman, demonstrate that rescue was, in fact, possible. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, he was a leader in the efforts to finance the Revisionist Zionist movement's 'underground railroad', which brought unauthorized immigration (aliyah bet) of Jews from Europe to Mandatory Palestine. Among the notable operations in which he was involved was the voyage of the refugee ship Sakariya, which rescued more than 2,000 European Jewish refugees by bringing them to Palestine in February 1940. Might more have been rescued if the British had not shut the gates to Palestine at the time when Jewish refugees were desperately searching for a haven? Yours Truly,
Saul Newman
April 11, 2004
Letters to the Editor Jewish Quarterly Review Center for Advanced Judaic Studies University of Pennsylvania 420 Walnut St. Philadelphia, PA 19106 Dear Editor: In his book review (JQR, 94:1/Winter 2004), William D. Rubinstein claimed, erroneously, that "after the outbreak of the Second World War rescue [of Jews from Hitler] was impossible since Jews under Nazism were no longer refugees but prisoners of Hitler." In fact, there were numerous instances in which Jews were rescued from Hitler Europe during World War II--and many more could have been saved if the Allies had made any meaningful effort in that direction. For example, the President's Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, a body created by President Roosevelt in 1938 but given no power or government funding, managed to rescue some 2,000 refugee intellectuals and anti-Nazi activists, many of them Jews, and bring them to the United States in 1940-1941 despite constant interference from the State Department. New York editor-turned-refugee advocate Varian Fry and a U.S. consular official in Marseille, Hiram Bingham IV, rescued several thousand refugee intellectuals and artists, many of them Jews, by sheltering them and smuggling them out of Vichy France in 1940-1941, despite the State Department's opposition. An estimated 630 European Jewish refugees were rescued by being brought to a camp established by the Allies in North Africa in 1944, after nearly a year of delays and foot-dragging. The plight of thousands of Jewish refugees in Spain during World War II did not arouse the Allies' interest--until American and British diplomats in Spain found that three thousand of them were males capable of doing war-related work for the Allies. At that point, they arranged to move those 3,000 to the safety of North Africa. The State Department agreed, in late 1942, to permit 200 Jewish refugee children in Spain and Portugal to come to the U.S., although subsequent bureaucratic obstacles delayed the rescue operation and only about 140 were actually rescued. The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, which was established by the U.S. and Great Britain in 1938 largely as a cover for their inaction on the refugee issue, finally came to life in the summer of 1944 by providing hundreds of thousand dollars to the Joint Distribution Committee to finance the rescue of refugees by paying non-Jews to hide them and smuggling others out of Axis territory. The Roosevelt administration claimed that there was no Allied shipping available to bring refugees from Europe to the United States. In 1943, private relief workers in Casablanca found that local military authorities were willing to take refugees on empty supply ships returning to America. Fourteen refugees were rescued in this manner, until the State Department discovered what happened and blocked that method of escape. The most substantial rescue operations undertaken by the U.S. were those of the War Refugee Board, which was established by FDR in early 1944 under strong pressure from Congress, Jewish activists, and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Although understaffed and underfinanced, the WRB played an important role in bringing about the rescue of an estimated 200,000 Jews in Hitler Europe. These included 48,000 Jews in Transnistria who were moved to safe areas in Rumania as a result of the WRB's diplomatic pressure; the 120,000 Jews in Budapest whose lives were saved when the Hungarian deportations to Auschwitz were halted by the WRB's pressure; some 15,000 Jewish refugees who were evacuated from Axis controlled territory by the WRB; and the protection of more than 10,000 Jewish refugees within Hitler Europe by rescuers such as Raoul Wallenberg, whose work was financed and facilitated by the WRB. Under the WRB's pressure, the administration agreed to permit one group of 982 refugees from Hitler (89% of them Jews) to be brought into the U.S. outside the quota system in 1944. These and other rescue efforts could have been expanded and multiplied if not for the constant opposition and interference by Roosevelt's State Department, which feared that the rescue of Jews would increase pressure to give them haven in the United States, and the opposition of the British government, which feared that rescue would create pressure to bring them to British Mandatory Palestine. Internal State Department memoranda from the period reveal its attitude quite clearly. State Department official Cavendish Cannon, for example, stated bluntly that he opposed moving Jews from Rumania to British-ruled Syria or Palestine because "endorsement of such a plan [was] likely to bring about new pressure for an asylum in the western hemisphere..." Likewise, his colleague R. Borden Reams worried about what he called "the danger that the German Government might agree to turn over to the United States and to Great Britain a large number of Jewish refugees at some designated place for immediate transportation to areas under the control of the United Nations." That "danger" was something the Roosevelt administration was determined to avoid. Cordially,
Rafael Medoff, Ph.D.
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