Jack Eisner, the principle financial supporter of the recently abandoned research commission established 15 months ago to study what the organized American Jewish community did or failed to do to save European Jewry during the years 1939-1945, said here that he was willing to provide the necessary funding for the reformation of the commission to continue with the project.
At the same time, in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Eisner warned that any attempt by Arthur Goldberg, the former U.S. Supreme Court Justice and chairman of the commission, and Seymour Finger, a professor at the City Univer- sity of New York Graduate School and research chief of the commission, to publish a book on the commission’s subject with the information already obtained, would be challenged by both Eisner and the Jack Eisner Institute for Holocaust Studies at the Graduate School of the City University.
He said Finger and Goldberg do not have a legal right to the information gathered by the commission before it was disbanded because the research was paid for by the Jack Eisner Institute for Holocaust Studies.
The 26-member commission, The American Jewish Commission on the Holocaust, was privately formed in September, 1981, and was disbanded last August in a flurry of controversy. Goldberg and Finger accused Eisner, who is a businessman and Holocaust survivor, of having failed to meet his financial obligations.
REASON FOR WITHHOLDING FUNDS
Eisner contended that he withheld funding for the project following a stormy meeting in June, 1982 when the key research historian for the project and his assistant resigned from the project, and Goldberg’s subsequent assertion that he would continue the commission’s work, along with Finger, on his own.
According to Eisner, the researcher, Samuel Merlin, the director of the Institute for Mediterranean Affairs in New York, which studies events in the Middle East and World War II, including the Holocaust, along with a team assistants, wrote an opening draft report that was critical of the established Jewish community in the United States for failing to act forcefully and exert sufficient pressure on the Roosevelt Administration to increase immigration quotas for European Jews.
At the meeting last June, Eisner told the JTA, Merlin was continually insulted by members of the established Jewish community who were also members of the commission and who sought to have their respective organization’s names and predecessor, in some cases, deleted from the critical report, Eisner said this included members of the American Jewish Congress, the Zionist Organization of American and Hadassah.
Eisner, who said he attended all the meetings of the commission as an honorary member, conceded that he had no vote in policy nor did he participate in the debate at the fateful meeting in June.
He asserted that Goldberg had promised Merlin prior to the outset of the meeting that he would be given an opportunity to refute charges levelled against him and the substance of his report. Merlin never received a chance to speak on his own behalf, Eisner claimed, and he resigned.
At this point, according to Eisner’s account, Goldberg said he would write his own report without the efforts of a research team consisting of Merlin or any other team as a replacement. “It was at this point,” Eisner said, “that I saw he was giving in to pressure from the Jewish organizations and the old established vested interests.” He said it was then that he stopped his financial contributions to the commission.
WAS SATISFIED WITH INITIAL STATEMENTS
Eisner said he was satisfied with the initial statements by Finger and Goldberg that they would not “bow to pressures” from the organized Jewish community. After the first commission meeting in September, 1981, Eisner said he was “real impressed” that the commission would follow through with its goals and study the subjects without bias and with objectivity. He pointed out that his only preconditions set down when initiating the commission was that the members not be Holocaust survivors nor gentiles.
Eisner claimed he had pledged $140,000 to the two-year study and had supplied $58,000 at this point. Goldberg and Finger alleged that the commission was abandoned, because, as Finger said, “The sponsor did not come up with the money.” Eisner was reported to have supplied $40,000 of the total sum by the summer of 1982, $52,000 short of the scheduled $92,000 he was to have supplied the commission by June, according to a reported payment schedule of $23,000 to have been made in interview with the JTA earlier this month, when the news of the commission’s demise surfaced, denied emphatically that he had been pressured or scared off by the established Jewish organizations, saying, “At this time in my life no one can scare me.” Goldberg said he intended to write a book on the subject and that his motto, “to let the chips fall where they may,” will guide the writing of the book as it had guided the work of the commission.
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.
