The national convention of the American Jewish Congress, attended by some 400 delegates from 73 cities, today called upon the Jews to organize for political tasks in preparation for peace and heard a message from British Ambassador Lord Lothian stressing that an Allied victory was the Jews’ “only real hope.”
The convention, warning that a million Jews would be destroyed if oppression continued for another year, called on Jews to identify themselves with forces seeking the reorganization of Europe as the only hope that there would be a future for Jews in the world.
Lord Lothian’s message follows: “The present war is in the main the outcome of a policy of brutality and intolerance of which the Jewish people were the first victims. The victory of the Allied Powers in this war offers to Jews their only real hope of escaping from the hateful maltreatment of their race and of renewing their march toward Zionist ideals in concord with the Arab people.”
At a dinner Sunday night, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt said that “this country should not remain indifferent to the sorrows of other parts of the world” and declared that many Christians were interested in helping refugees. She pledged her personal aid whenever called on. Other speakers were Senator Warren Barbour, Czechoslovak Minister Vladimir Hurban, and Dr. Nahum Goldmann and the Rev. Maurice L. Perlzweig, of the World Jewish Congress.
Dr. Goldmann, addressing the opening session Saturday night, declared that at present, “no stabilization of the Jewish situation in Europe is imaginable. European Jewry cannot go on living under its present conditions.” He emphasized that the only hope for Jews was if they recognized the political character of their problem and organized politically in order to meet it. He added that the fate of the Jews of Europe was bound up with the fate of Europe itself and that just as only the political reorganization of Europe could save European civilization, so Jewish life might be continued in Europe if this political reorganization took place.
The enemies of civilization have seen in Jewry the vanguard of the democracy they seek to destroy, Perlzweig said. He declared: “First the Jew, then the Christian, then the democrat is the sequence. For Christianity is a Jewish religion and democracy is born of Hebrew parentage. If the Jew goes down in this struggle, then woe to the rest of the world.”
Dr. Stephen S. Wise, president of the Congress, yesterday clarified the relations of the Congress with the General Jewish Council in his annual report. He denied the Congress sought to withdraw from the Council, but asserted that it had been ineffective. A resolution on the Congress-Council relationship was scheduled to be acted upon today.
“Candor and honesty, as well as the historical requirements of the hour, compel a frank statement of the case,” Dr. Wise said. “The facts indeed are that we have not achieved a working unity, that we have not been able to bring about a functioning unity. We have had nothing more than the name and shadow of unity, its form rather than its substance. We shall not permit the Jewish people to rest under the false illusion that the General Jewish Council is a unified and functioning body which oversees and manages the whole field of Jewish affairs. The very term, General Jewish Council, has lulled Jews to sleep, because of the impression that Jewish affairs generally are being cared for with vigilance by this all-embracing body representing fairly and adequately all Jewish groups and elements when, in fact, the very terms of its founding limited the scope of union, and even these limiting terms have not been lived up to.
“The court of last resort of the American Jewish Congress is not the General Jewish Council, which we recognize and accept despite all professions to the contrary as a purely and solely consultative body. The court of last resort of the American Jewish Congress is that great body of Jews from which it derives its support, which called it into being, the Jewish masses of America. The Jewish people of America must not only be kept continuously informed of what is happening within the Council and within the life of American Jewry, but must be enabled to react upon the Congress and the General Jewish Council.”
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.
