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J.D.C. Facing Heaviest Burden in Its History, St. Louis Parley Told

January 24, 1938
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Asserting that attacks upon the Jews in European countries constitute one of the gravest threats not only to Jews but to humanity, Dr. Bernhard Kahn, European Director of the Joint Distribution Committee, told a meeting of its Plan and Scope Committee for the 1938 national fund-raising campaign here today that American aid represented the primary hope of millions of human beings, and that American financial aid meant at the same time encouragement in the terrible struggle of the Jews to survive.

“A major crisis has arisen in the lives and fates of some five million Jews overseas,” said Dr. Kahn. “Persecution and proscription are making their existence all but impossible in many regions, at a time when it is difficult if not impossible to find havens where most of them can flee to. In countries overseas where they thought they had found a haven they are again ejected because these countries have bowed to the European theories of hatred against Jews.

“Germany, Poland, Rumania, lands where the humiliating legal discriminations, boycott, violent agitation, actual deeds of violence are occurring, are a roster not merely of anti-Jewish countries but of countries which violate at the same time humanitarian traditions. To a lesser extent Austria and Yugoslavia are beginning to discriminate against The Jews, the latter country especially against foreign Jews. What is happening to the Jews throughout Europe constitutes a direct and dangerous threat to all humane ideals which for hundreds of years have guided the relations of man to man, nation to nation and creed to creed.

“Ever since the World War America’s role in this European tragedy has been an honorable one. Aid, relief and reconstruction have been offered very often without distinction of race or creed and this, I take it, is the essence of the humanitarian idea.

“The Joint Distribution Committee, which, in cooperation with the other great American humanitarian agencies has played an outstanding role, is now facing the heaviest burdens in its entire history. As the channel of organized aid to Jewish populations overseas, the Joint Distribution Committee is the chief hope of millions of oppressed and impoverished human beings. It is with deeds of mercy and of reconstructive aid and encouragement that the present crisis must be faced. It is in this spirit and with an appropriate program, subject to the limitation of the funds at its disposal, that the Joint Distribution Committee is working.”

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