Broadcasting over a nationwide hookup of the Mutual Broadcasting System on a special Passover program presented in cooperation with the American Jewish Committee, former Governor Herbert H. Lehman tonight called for temporary emergency measures which would admit a “fair share of the victims of Nazism” to the United States.
As “a nationa of immigrants” built by the contributions of immigrants of all countries and faiths, the United States has a special responsibility to maintain its historic policy of affording sanctuary to the oppressed, Governor Lehman said. “We, as heritors of the tradition of humen liberation which the seder service of Passover commemorates, must see to it that for those who survived the Nazi war of extermination, the tradition of human liberty is made real and living,” Governor Lehman declared.
In urging assignment of unused immigration quotas as an emergency step, the former Director General of UNRRA stressed that the problem is a non-sectarian one and that “for the past fifteen years the annual immigration quota of our country has not been filled.”
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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.