One of every 25 members of the U.S. armed forces was Jewish and their records are typical of America’s participation in World War II, Maj. Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, director of the Selective Service, said tonight, addressing a dinner at the Waldorf Astoria to mark the completion of the gathering of statistics on Jewish participation in the last war, which will appear this Spring in two volumes entitled “American Jews in World War II.”
The data gathered by committees in Jewish communities throughout the country under the direction of the Jewish Welfare Board’s Bureau of War Records shows that more than 500,000 Jewish men and women served in the U.S. armed forces. Additional data and supplementary statistics are still being gathered.
Gen. Hershey paid tribute to the far-flung activities of the JWB during the war and conveyed the “greetings and best wishes” of President Truman. “The President is deeply aware of the contributions made by the National Jewish Welfare Board,” General Hershey said. “I know that he shares the pride of all Americans in the history of the American Jewish community’s achievement–a history now made available by the Bureau of War Records to us and to posterity.”
Other speakers at the dinner included Frank L. Weil, president of the JWB., Dr. Louis I. Dublin, chairman of the JWB’s Bureau of War Records and vice-president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; Dr. Samuel C. Kohs, director of the Bureau and an outstanding statistician, and Ralph K. Guinzburg, assistant secretary of the JWB.
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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.
