The World Jewish Congress during the Holocaust: Between Activism and Restraint

In November 1946 a document titled "The Program of the World Jewish Congress" was published in New York. It began by presenting the principles underlying the founding of the WJC, as well as the constellation of political circumstances that had prevailed at the time the organization was established in 1936. The following passage appears in this document: The isolated efforts of single Jewish organizations in individual countries could not meet the needs of the entire Jewish people. And so international Jewish associations for the attainment of specific objectives came into being. In 1897 the World Zionist Organization was formed for the purpose of establishing a legally secured, publicly recognized Jewish homeland in Palestine. The creation of an organization to look after the needs and interests of Jews throughout the world waited for a later opportunity to materialize.467 Couched in official language, this brief statement alludes to a political and ideological endeavor of great importance, which the World Jewish Congress announced at its inception and which its leadership led and promoted throughout the Jewish world during the first half of the twentieth century. It sought to found an international Jewish organization that supported the establishment of a Jewish state, but also acted to reinforce life in Jewish communities around the world under the format of "Diaspora nationalism."The full significance of this process may be appreciated by examining the world view of Stephen Wise, the founder of the WJC, regarding Theodore Herzl and Jewish nationalism. In the summer of 1929, Wise delivered a lecture at a gathering in commemoration of Herzl. He began by stressing that the Jewish people had been reshaped by Herzl, who had transformed the public modes of operation of the Jewish elites.468 Wise explained that in the pre-Herzlian era Jews whom he described as powerful were accustomed to assisting other Jews solely by way of philanthropy, but never in conjunction with the wider Jewish public. Herzl had changed this by initiating joint activity on the part of Jews of different socio-economic strata in order to establish patterns of Jewish life. Wise's portrayal suggested that by doing this Herzl had created genuine Jewish solidarity that rested upon robust foundations and constituted an essential part of a reemerging Jewish national existence in the modern age. Wise further asserted that in the era prior to Herzl, problems concerning Jewish existence had been aired for discussion by non-Jews, who had also proposed the solutions. These solutions were frequently imposed upon the Jews, who could only attempt to minimize the damage they caused. Wise defined this situation as "tragic,"noting that the Jews had never examined what they themselves could do to resolve what he had previously termed the "Jewish questions."469 Wise believed that this situation had been completely once Herzl had turned the "Jewish question"into an issue that the Jews themselves had addressed as they identified the problems and sought to resolve them as Jews. Prior to Herzl's time, anti-Semitism had been the moving force of Jewish life; the Jews had merely reacted to the distress it had caused them and had frequently been convinced by the anti-Semites' arguments, which had induced them to try to modify their Jewishness and to downplay their singularity as Jews. By turning Zionism into the major element that initiated and motivated the life of Jews, Herzl had transformed their condition, refusing to respond to anti-Semitic acts and facilitating Jewish pride. Wise compared Herzl's importance and significance to that of the Messiah, claiming that the self-initiated transformation that had occurred among the Jews in the wake of Herzl's activity was the most genuine and wonderful miracle of all.470 In his lecture Wise maintained that Herzl's tremendous importance to Jewish history stemmed not only from having succeeded in creating an ideological infrastructure and organizational platform for the founding of a Jewish state, but also from having created new forms of Jewish existence around the world. A by-product of the enormous effort made by world Jewry to build a national home was the unification of the worldwide Jewish community as a political force seeking common goals and administering active institutions. As the above citation indicates, the dramatic crisis that confronted the Jews of Europe from the latter half of the 1930s reinforced the conviction of Wise and his colleagues that it was essential to express the world view expounded in his 1929 lecture by founding a representative international Jewish organization. They maintained that it was necessary to found the WJC because the Zionist movement was primarily occupied with the affairs of Palestine, and this additional organization would thus be preoccupied with addressing the needs of world Jewry. The great majority of the founders of the WJC considered themselves to be Zionists, and some holding senior positions in the Zionist movement. They saw no contradiction between their Zionist leanings and activity within the WJC. They fought diligently for the establishment of a Jewish state, while at the same time striving to empower the ethnic identity of Diaspora Jews. As documented throughout this book, the organization's founders were well aware of the existence of Jewish philanthropic organizations that devoted their efforts toward the Jews of the Diaspora. Yet the founders of the WJC and its activists during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s believed that since these organizations operated as philanthropies they were unable to confront the Jews' existential crisis that began in the 1930s. Thus, in contrast to other organizations, from its inception in 1936 to the outbreak of World War II the WJC involved itself in world and European politics worldwide, at the League of Nations, and with representatives of European governments as it attempted to ameliorate the condition of European Jewry and to create solutions for long-term migration. The outbreak of war and reports of the extermination of Europe's Jews induced WJC leadership and its operatives in neutral European countries to adopt modes of operation that were very different from the conventional patterns of philanthropic work in the Jewish public sphere. In this spirit they created a streamlined system for gathering information on the acts of murder and extermination in Europe, and set up a clandestine operation in neutral countries and in those under German occupation in order to rescue Jewish children and to facilitate the survival of Jews who had gone into hiding. The discussion in this book of World Jewish Congress activities during the Holocaust reveals the complex and daunting challenges that the organization's leadership encountered during this period. The material presented here demonstrates that the WJC leaders did all that they could to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. This conclusion is at odds with the trenchant criticism, also described in this book, on the part of contemporaries and scholars alike, of the allegedly muted effort made by American Jewish leaders in general and the WJC leadership in particular to effect the rescue of Jews. As mentioned above, examination of the WJC program reveals that by 1946 its leaders were aware of this criticism and sought to make public the variety of actions taken by the organization on behalf of Europe's Jews during the war years. The Congress maintained that these activities would only gain the recognition they deserved at some point in the future. During the war years, the World Jewish Congress was the tireless representative in the free world of the Jews of the Axis-occupied countries. Its chief concern was to save Jewish lives from imminent death at the hands of the Nazis. It is too early to enumerate all the manifold and dramatic endeavors in this field. Suffice it to say that the Congress engaged in rescue work by ransoming and smuggling Jews out of Nazi-held areas. It prevailed upon the Swedish Government to permit the entry of Jews from Denmark. It marshaled its connections and influences to prevent the mass deportation of Jews from Bulgaria and Hungary. For those and other activities which the future historian will relate with pride, the World Jewish Congress mobilized the Jews of the New World, where it has always had a large and devoted following, especially in Latin America. The explanation of these diverse assessments calls for an examination of the activities of Stephen Wise, Nahum Goldmann, and their colleagues in the leadership of the WJC within the American arena. Their activities should be appraised not merely as the actions of Jewish leaders, but also as those of American Jewish leaders who operated within the political and social milieu of the United States. While they were dissatisfied with the level of the Roosevelt administration's commitment to the rescue of European Jews, they understood that it was subject to the constraints inherent to American politics in the first half of the 1940s. They believed that it would be unwise to exert excessive public pressure on President Roosevelt to take action to rescue European Jews, and sought to understate the president's engagement in the Jewish dilemma. Their intention was to protect Roosevelt from being presented as a friend of the Jews and as having led the United States into the war in response to Jewish pressure rather than out of concern for American interests. Wise, Goldmann, and their colleagues sought to create a durable association between the issue of Jewish rescue and the inevitable American victory in the war; thus they downplayed the presence of the Jewish issue in the American public sphere. They believed that there was no need to intensify Jewish activity by, for example, convening press conferences and demonstrations designed specifically to promote the rescue of European Jewry. The operation to rescue children orchestrated from Lisbon and the political steps taken on behalf of the Jewish communities of Denmark, Bulgaria, and Hungary were thus conducted clandestinely behind the scenes, in keeping with the policy of restraint that dictated the Congress's actions during World War II. The correspondence between the WJC offices in the neutral countries and its New York headquarters, the minutes of its various committee meetings, and the reports on events in Europe are all written in dry, formal language. Nevertheless, they provide a clear indication of the deep distress felt by the WJC leaders at the time of the Holocaust. From the information gathered by the Congress's European bureaus they learned first-hand of the horrors of the Holocaust, but realized that they could rescue only a small number of individuals and were powerless to halt the murder of European Jewry. In an academic work such as this it is difficult to depict the dreadful circumstances under which Stephen Wise came to the conclusion that he must delay publication of the information he had received via the Riegner telegram. It is similarly difficult to portray the depth of emotion that Nahum Goldmann experienced as he declared in his letter of April 1943 to Yitzhak Gruenbaum, chairman of the Palestine Rescue Committee, that he assumed with a heavy heart that most of Europe's Jews living in the areas under Nazi occupation would be murdered.472 The policy of restraint pertaining to the response of American Jewry to the Holocaust that Wise, Goldmann and their colleagues followed in the American public sphere is extensively addressed in this book. The correspondence between Wise and Goldmann during World War II and thereafter reveals the personal and public price that the two men paid for directing this policy of restraint. While they remained convinced of the wisdom of the path they had chosen, the secrecy inherent in administering a policy of this sort and the need to conceal it from the wider ranks of WJC delegates and from the American Jewish public in general, considerably diminished their stature as leaders during World War II and thereafter, and their public standing suffered. Wise and Goldmann's personal and public distress cries out from the archived material. This is particularly evident in the case of Wise, who was among the most prominent Jewish leaders in the United States during the 1940s. A clear manifestation of his predicament is seen in his efforts to cancel the April 1943 press conference arranged to address the fate of European Jewry. Wise did cancel the event, but only with much painful soul searching and a deeply held conviction that by so doing he was fulfilling, to the best of his ability, his duty as a Jewish leader during World War II. He wrote to Goldmann that it was very easy to convene press conferences and public meetings, but that one must also take their possible ramifications into account. He believed that such activities would contribute nothing to the rescue effort; on the contrary, they would severely harm it, and would ultimately detract from his ability as leader of the American Jewish public to rescue Jews. Wise added that although Roosevelt had not acted on behalf of the Jews of Europe with the vigor that he, Wise, had expected, the president should nevertheless be thought of as a friend who had done all he could to help rescue Jews.473 The narrow confines within which Wise was obliged to maneuver are also evident in the restraint shown by the WJC in its campaign for a Jewish state. There are significant differences between the issue of rescue and the struggle for a Jewish state. Wise and Goldmann believed that although Jewish American activity on behalf of founding a Jewish state that challenged Roosevelt's administration was undesirable, such activity did not resemble the attempts to lobby aggressively for assistance to European Jewry. The issue of Palestine was close to the heart of the Jewish public and occupied decision makers in the administration, but did not have the public and political significance of the rescue issue. Unlike the war in Europe, the question of the founding of a Jewish state was not at the top of the national agenda, did not personally engage every American, and therefore was not potentially harmful to the president, since his political opponents could not significantly exploit the issue in order to denigrate him. Despite these differences, Wise also took steps to moderate the Jewish campaign in the United States with regard to the establishment of a Jewish state. He wholeheartedly supported the cause, but opposed the submission of the pro-Zionist resolutions to Congress in 1943 and 1944 and, unlike Reform rabbi and Zionist leader Abba Hillel Silver, took steps to prevent the use of the Jewish vote as a tool in the American Zionist struggle against the administration.