Relief agency workers here are appealing to the State Department to treat Berlin as an entity and permit Jewish refugees living in all sectors of the city to apply for entrance to the United States under President Truman’s directive which at present limits immigration to persons residing in the American zone.
The U.S. consul here admitted today that it has become almost impossible to find enough German Jewish refugees in the American sector who can comply with the rigid requirements of the immigration directive, especially the clause which demands that the prospective immigrants should have been in that section of Berlin before Dec. 22, 1945.
Another factor which is disqualifying large numbers of German Jews is that after World War I the areas in which they were living were transferred to Poland and, although they soon returned to German soil and lived there, they are still classified as Polish nationals and come under the minute Polish quota.
Relief workers point out that most people desiring to emigrate at this time fall into the classification of “borderline cases,” and that the consulate generally bends backwards to disqualify the applicants, while a fair share of the monthly allotments remain unfilled and are lost.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
