More than 1,400 campaign workers of the Cleveland Jewish Welfare Fund who crowded the grand ballroom of the Hotel Statler last night heard Dr. Chaim Weizmann, president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and Edward M.M. Warburg, chairman of the Joint Distribution Committee, describe the problems and needs created by the war.
Dr. Weizmann asserted that democracy would triumph, but that triumph alone would not solve the problems of the Jews. In order for the victory of democracy to have a meaning for the Jewish people, "we must be prepared to speak with one voice when the day comes," he said.
Introduced by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver as "the Ezra of our second resurrection," Dr. Weizmann pictured a European Jewry uprooted, trampled upon and scattered to the corners of the world. He called on the Jews to face beforehand the fundamental problem which would grow more and more acute-wandering of millions of homeless Jews. He pictured Palestine as the only solution for these masses of people.
"The remnant of Jewry must unite on two things," he asserted. "We must demand that after the democratic victory our position, legal and moral, be restored in all of Europe. All that we have built in Europe through our toil over 150 years, all has been destroyed. We must be assured the right to build again. And we must demand the opportunity to absorb, mainly through Palestine, those millions of our people who hang now between heaven and hell, and integrate them again into society.
"The test of the sincerity of the democracies will be whether they can offer us a decent solution, after this victory, to our problem. We expect full and unhampered opportunity to continue building Palestine. We expect a settlement of the Palestine problem without ambiguity or equivocation. We must be prepared to speak in one voice, voicing these demands when the day comes."
"The Arab problem," he said, "is entering a new phase. The post-war world will see free Arab countries, owing their freedom to the democracies. We can stabilize these countries if given a dog’s chance. And we expect that chance."
Warburg described the terror and suffering of the Jews in Europe. He spoke of the hundreds of thousands of Jews trapped in the fires of Germany and Central Europe and the unceasing efforts of the J.D.C. to bring them to safety through the only two "fire escapes"–Lisbon, via unoccupied France, and Japan, via Siberia and Vladivostok.
Warburg described American Jewry as "the last ray of hope for the homeless and broken Jews of Europe." He asserted that all Europe, as far as the Jews were concerned, was "a vast concentration camp." He reiterated that not a penny of the funds raised for the relief and extrication of the refugees had been or ever would be used "to help the economy of the aggressor nations or to break the British blockade."
Rabbis Silver and Barnett R. Brickner are co-chairmen of the Cleveland campaign, which opens May 7.
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.
