Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein, recently returned from Germany where he is special advisor on Jewish problems to American Military Governor Lucius D. Clay and to Gen. Mark W. Clark, commanding general in Austria, told a press conference here today that “fandementally, there is no future for the Jews in Germany.” The two possible solutions to the overall problem of displaced persons is emigration either to Palestine or to the United States, he said.
An army survey on anti-Semitism in the American zone, Bernstein pointed out, concluded that “four in ten germans are so strongly imbued with anti-Semitism that it is very doubtful that they would object to overt action against the Jews.”
About 90 per cent of the Jewish DP’s in Germany and Austria would want to go to Palestine, if that country were opened to them immediately, he said. If other immigration possibilities should open up at the same time, he said, about 75 per cent would want to go to Palestine and the rest to the western democracies. There remains, however, a “core of Jews, perhaps 50 per cent, who will choose to sweat it out for Palestine regardless of delays and regardless of other immigration possibilities.” Bernstein discounted stories that a “mass exodus” to Palestine either “would or should” take place.
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