Bermuda Conference Letter from Rabbi Stephen S. Wise

Three typed pages on American Jewish Congress Letterhead. Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash: Letter (copy) from Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, co-chairman of the Joint Emergency Committee for European Jewish affairs, to Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles concerning the Program for the Rescue of Jews (see 2015.2.181). By the end of 1942 it was clear that the Nazis intended to liquidate European Jewry. Jewish groups in the United States and United Kingdom beseeched their governments to take defensive action. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, president of both the American and the World Jewish Congresses, wanted to help ease the plight of German Jews through boycotting German goods and increasing emigration from the Third Reich. His pleas to Franklin Delano Roosevelt were largely ignored, and there was little interest among non-Jews in doing anything to help European Jews. As the news of the final solution became increasingly apparent, the American Jewish Committee joined with seven other organizations to form the Joint Emergency Committee on European Jewish Affairs. This group submitted a proposal to the Bermuda Conference. With Jewish groups in both United States and Britain demanding their respective governments to arrive at potential solutions to help the Jews living under German occupation, the two governments met together at Hamilton, Bermuda on April 19, 1943 to discuss this topic. The American presentation was led by Princeton University President Dr. Harold W. Dodds. However, with neither the U.S. willing to lift immigration quotas, nor the British willing to remove prohibitions on Jewish refuge in Palestine, the Bermuda Conference was not able to save a single Jew.https://digital.kenyon.edu/bulmash/2684/thumbnail.jp