More than one hundred prominent citizens, including Albert Einstein, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert H. Lehman, have petitioned the President and government departments concerned, to free the 968 refugees from the government shelter at Fort Ontario.
Declaring that “while Americans are fighting to establish freedom and human dignity throughout the world, it is scarcely to be tolerated that anti-Nazi refugees should be confined against their will at Fort Ontario,” the group, acting as the Sponsors’ Committee of the Friends of Fort Ontario Guest-Refugees, recommended that the government should:
1 – Give the refugees at Fort Ontario their immediate freedom to live and work wherever they choose in the United States; and regularize, as quickly as possible, the status of those who normally would have been eligible for immigration; 2 – Facilitate the repatriation, or emigration to other countries, of those who desire it; and 3 – Declare it to be the policy of the United States that no law-abiding political or religious refugee should be repatriated or sent to another country against his will.
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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.
