The United States Government was urged tonight to intervene with the British Government to secure modification of the policy of admitting Jewish refugees into Palestine, in a resolution adopted at a mass meeting arranged by the American Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs at the Cosmopolitan Opera House here. The meeting mourned the death of the more than 750 Jewish refugees from Rumania who lost their lives in the waters of the Black Sea on the freighter Struma, after being refused admission to Palestine.
Presided over by Dr. Stephen S. Wise, the meeting was addressed by Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado, Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr of the Union Theological Seminary, Dr. James G. Heller, President of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Mrs. David de Sola Pool, Hadassah President, Mr. David Ben-Gurion, Chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency for Palestine and Dr. A. Samuel Brodt, former Chief Rabbi of Antwerp, Belgium. The speakers demanded that Palestine be opened to victims of Nazi persecution.
In asking intervention on the part of the United States Government, the resolution adopted at the meeting demanded that:
1. Such immediate changes in the policies as well as the personnel of the British Administration in Palestine be effected as shall make impossible the repetition of such appalling disasters.
2. The 700 refugees from the Darien who, after escaping from the pogroms in Rumania have been interned for more than 12 months on Palestinian soil under threat of deportation, be immediately released.
3. The 1800 refugees who were deported under the most distressing circumstances to the Island of Mauritius by the Palestine Administration in March 1941 be returned to Palestine.
4. The Jewish victims of Nazism be treated as democracy’s friends and not as its foes.
5. The doors of Palestine be opened to those desperate people who knock at its doors only to be cast back into the sea.
6. British policy in Palestine be brought into harmony with the high ideals to which Britain and the United Nations are committed.
Earlier in the day the Emergency Committee cabled a direct appeal to Winston Churchill which stated: “We have the right and the duty to insist that there be such changes in policies and in the men in the Palestine Administration as shall prevent any recurrence of these appalling happenings. In the name of all American Zionists we register our solemn protest.”
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