1,521 Prominent Americans Issue Proclamation on Jewish Rights in Europe and Palestine

A “Proclemation on the Moral Rights of the Stateless and Palestinian Jews” signed by 1,521 leading Americans and praised by Secretary of the Navy Knox as an historic document, was made public here today by the Committee for a Jewish Army of which Pierre van paassen is national chairman.

Signed by congressmen, generals, admirals, leading government officials, as well as by Herbert Hoover, former ambassador Joseph E. Davies, William Green, Philip Murray and prominent industrialists, artists and clergymen, the document proclaims “the right of the Jews of the Old World to live in freedom and equality, enjoying the rights and privileges of all other human beings.” It stresses the right of “the dispersed, disinherited Jews of Europe and the proud Jewish people of Palestine” to fight the Axis in their own army and under their own insignia, and points out that the solution of the Jewish problem in Europe must be one of the objectives of democracy, to the end that the Jewish people no longer be “compelled to haunt the corridors of Time as ghosts and beggars and waifs of every storm that rages.”

Emphasizing that “hundreds of thousands of Jews have perished” under Hitler, and that “the Jews were not only the first victims of Hitler’s aggression, but the most persecuted and most tortured,” the Proclamation says that Americans have a duty to perform since “the eyes of the world’s oppressed and heavy-laden are on Washington,” It calls on America not to fail the Jews of Nazi-Europe, and says:

“From this day onward, as heirs of the glorious American tradition and by virtue of the great moral authority vested in our Nation at the present critical historic conjuncture, we, people of America, recognize the solution of the age-old Jewish problem in Europe as one of the objectives of democracy and as a preliminary condition to permanent peace in the world.