Fifty-one years after they were denied entry into the United States and turned back to Europe, survivors of the St. Louis gathered Sunday to offer their moral support to Soviet Jews now seeking refuge.
Susan Schleger, Dr. Hans Fisher and Liane Reif-Lehrer held a small rally at the Isaiah Wall opposite the United Nations to warn that American failure to support Israel could leave Soviet Jews to a similar fate they themselves suffered in 1939.
“We were not wanted. We were abandoned by the world,” said Schleger, a 68-year-old survivor now residing in New York. “We must now try our utmost to get the Soviet Jews out. It’s not fair to ask the Russians to let the Jews cut and then not to do anything about it.”
The gray and threatening sky did not diminish the symbolic impact of the setting. The survivors stood beneath a prayer shawl rescued from the Holocaust with the prophet Isaiah’s famous words etched into the wall in the background: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore.”
On what is now called “the Voyage of the Damned,” the St. Louis embarked from Hamburg in May 1939, with a human cargo of 1,128 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. Bound originally for Cuba, the ill-fated ship was denied entry into any port on this side of the Atlantic, including a U.S. port in Miami.
With no place to land, the ship was forced back to Europe, where the passengers were received according to an international agreement signed by England, Holland, Belgium and France.
After most of Europe, with the exception of England, was overrun by the Nazis, few of those refugees survived the war years.
‘NEED TO BE GIVEN A HAVEN’
The 75 who did survive met last year in Miami for their 50th reunion. Only then did some of them decide to become vocal on behalf of the Soviet Jews now fleeing rising popular anti-Semitism in their homeland.
“I spent a lot of my life trying to forget about all this,” said Reif-Lehrer, a scientist from Boston, who was a small child at the time of the voyage. She is now writing a book about her and other St. Louis survivors’ stories.
“It’s hard to compare” the flight from Nazi Germany and the Soviet exodus now taking place, she said. “But I feel that where people are being hassled or persecuted, Jews or otherwise, they need to be given a haven.”
“As open and violent anti-Semitism begins to reappear in parts of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,” said Fisher, a professor at Rutgers University, “Israel becomes the only haven for hundreds of thousands of Jews.”
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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.
