Adolph Held, president of the Jewish Labor Committee, which represents 500,000 organized Jewish workers in this country today submitted a memorandum to Secretary of State Cordell Hull asking for the complete restoration in liberated France of rights and property to East European Jews who lived there before June 1940.
(In Algiers, the Minister of Justice of the French Committee of National Liberation announced last night that all anti-Jewish laws issued by the Vichy regime will be annulled in the liberated parts of France and pre-war republican regulations will be applied there as conditions warrant.)
Mr. Held pointed out in his memorandum that of the approximately 300,000 Jews who resided in France before the war, only about 100,000 were French born. The remainder were immigrants, many of them un-naturalized. More than thirty thousand of them have served in the French armed forces during the war.
Estimating that 63,000 Jews have succeeded in escaping from German-dominated France and that tens of thousands have been deported by the Germans from various French cities to concentration camps in Poland, the memorandum appeals to the Secretary of State to intervene with the French authorities for the automatic readmission into France of all East European Jews who may like to return to their homes, as well as for the immediate return to these Jews of all the property confiscated from them under the Vichy anti-Jewish laws. In cases where the restoration of property is impossible, compensation should be arranged for the owners, the memorandum urges.
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