A joint committee representing the American Jewish Conference, the American Zionist Emergency Council, and the Jewish Agency for Palestine today called on Earl Halifax, British Ambassador to the United States, to submit a memorandum urging the British Government to open the gates of Palestine so that large numbers of homeless Jews new in liberated areas in Europe can enter immediately. Lord Halifax promised to transmit the plea to the British Foreign office at once “with the recommendation that it be given the most urgent and sympathetic consideration.”
Among the delegates were Dr. Stephen S. Wise, chairman of the Council; Hayim Greemberg and Herman Shulman, officers of the council; Dr. Israel Goldstein and Louis Lipsky, Co-chairmen of the interim commission of the American Jewish Conference, and Dr. Nahum Goldmann, American representative of the Jewish Agency in Palestine.
Pointing out that “psychological and material condition of the Jewish survivors in Europe is beyond description,” the statement to the British Government declared; “The world will not understand a policy of inaction at a time when delay may man for these people death by starvation and disease. They plead to be allowed to rebuild their lives in the Jewish National Home. It is inconceivable that while their own people in Palestine are waiting to receive and welcome them they should be condemned to continue in utter hopelessness where they are unwanted and do not wish to remain — in surroundings associated for them with recollections of grief and horror.”
The memorandum referred to reports that the majority of the 270,000 Jews in Rumania are completely pauperized and that at least 80 percent of Rumanian Jewry wish to go to Palestine, indicated that a similar situation prevails in other liberated territories, and denounced the fact that the 1,700 Jews who recently escaped from Germany are to be sent to temporary refuge camps in Algiers — ” A prolongation of the individual tragedy of each of these refugees.”
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