The British Government’s halting of “illegal” immigration and the deportation to Cyprus of visaless Jewish immigrants who reach Palestine was attacked today by the Mizrachi Organization of America in a statement issued by its acting president, Herman Hollander.
The statement termed the deportations “another indication which betrays the reactionary Labor Government’s total disregard for humaneness, morality and godliness.” Asserting that the Jews will not be kept out of their national home by the British blockade, the statement declares that Britain has “utterly failed its Jewish allies and one-time brothers-in-suffering at Haifa and Tel Aviv.”
Dr. David Petegorsky, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, issued a statement calling the deportation of Jews to Cyprus an attempt “to provoke the Jewish population of Palestine into full-scale civil war.” The move will aggravate existing tension in the country and “will make impossible any tolerable solution of the Palestine problem,” he said.
Maintaining that “the issue is no longer one between the British Government and the Jewish people,” Dr. Petergorsky added that all the people concerned with peace and security are affected by the British action. “The nations of the world will ignore that fact only at the cost of dire tragedy to mankind,” he concluded.
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.
