Gifts of over 5,000,000 pounds of Passover foods and nearly 100,000 religious articles–mostly from America–were distributed this week among Europe’s 1,500,000 surviving Jews in an effort to afford them something like a normal Passover observance.
The Joint Distribution Committee announced at its European headquarters here that 3,318,000 pounds of matzohs and 1,060,000 pounds of matzoh flour had been shipped to Jewish communities in virtually every country in Europe. In addition, 200,000 bottles of sacramental wine from Palestine were being distributed in Austria, Germany and Italy, where there are no local wine sources for the Jews in the DP camps. Twenty thousand Hagodahs, 53,000 prayer shawls, phylacteries and other religious objects as well as 10,000 prayer books have been gathered from all over the world for the European Jews.
At one time adverse weather conditions threatened to disrupt the JDC’s arrangements for distributing Passover supplies. As the holidays drew near, frantic telegrams from William Bein, JDC director in Poland, warned that matzohs for his area were icebound in Copenhagen harbor. Ragnar Gottfarb, JDC director in Stockholm, moved swiftly. A Swedish icebreaker was sent down the Gulf of Gdynia, breaking through the Baltic ice ahead of her convoy of twenty carloads of matzohs for Poland’s 100,000 Jews.
When the ship carrying supplies for Germany arrived in Genoa, the harbor was clogged with shipping which had been delayed by rough seas and a limited available land transport. To beat the delay, Ben Kaplan, supply chief in Germany, rushed to the Italian port, assembled a fleet of small boats and succeeded in unloading the Matzohs in time to make his distribution deadline. The shipment to famineridden Rumania was held up a whole week by snow-drifts blocking rail movements in Austria. In Rumania, after two successive years of crop failure, JDC shipments will be doing double duty–fending off starvation as well as making possible religious observance.
In the occupation areas, UNRRA and the US Army worked in close cooperation with the JDC in order to gather all the foods and necessities for the Passover. In the U.S. Zone of Germany, for example, the Army has made available to displaced Jews 150,000 eggs above the nomal ration.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
