Zohar Segev - The World Jewish Congress during the Holocaust: Between Activism and Restraint

In November 1946 a document titled The Program of the World Jewish Congress was published in New York. It began by presenting the principles underlying the founding of the WJC, as well as the constellation of political circumstances that had prevailed at the time the organization was established in 1936. The following passage appears in this document:

The isolated efforts of single Jewish organizations in individual countries could not meet the needs of the entire Jewish people. And so international Jewish associations for the attainment of specific objectives came into being. In 1897 the World Zionist Organization was formed for the

Couched in official language, this brief statement alludes to a political and ideological endeavor of great importance, which the World Jewish Congress announced at its inception and which its leadership led and promoted throughout the Jewish world during the first half of the twentieth century. It sought to found an international Jewish organization that supported the establishment of a Jewish state, but also acted to reinforce life in Jewish communities around the world under the format of Diaspora nationalism.

The full significance of this process may be appreciated by examining the world view of Stephen Wise, the founder of the WJC, regarding Theodore Herzl and Jewish nationalism. In the summer of 1929, Wise delivered a lecture at a gathering in commemoration of Herzl. He began by stressing that the Jewish people had been reshaped by Herzl, who had transformed the public modes of operation of the Jewish elites. Wise explained that in the pre-Herzlian era Jews whom he described as powerful were accustomed to assisting other Jews solely by way of philanthropy, but never in conjunction with the wider Jewish public. Herzl had changed this by initiating joint activity on the part of Jews of different socio-economic strata in order to establish patterns of Jewish life. Wises portrayal suggested that by doing this Herzl had created genuine Jewish solidarity that rested upon robust foundations and constituted an essential part of a reemerging Jewish national existence in the modern age. Wise further asserted that in the era prior to Herzl, problems concerning Jewish existence had been aired for discussion by non-Jews, who had also proposed the solutions. These solutions were frequently imposed upon the Jews, who could only attempt to minimize the damage they caused. Wise defined this situation as tragic, noting that the Jews had never examined what they themselves could do to resolve what he had previously termed the Jewish questions.

Wise believed that this situation had been completely once Herzl had turned the Jewish question into an issue that the Jews themselves had addressed as they identified the problems and sought to resolve them as Jews. Prior to Herzls time, anti-Semitism had been the moving force of Jewish life; the Jews had merely reacted to the distress it had caused them and had frequently been convinced by the anti-Semites arguments, which had induced them to try to modify their Jewishness and to downplay their singularity as Jews. By turning In his lecture Wise maintained that Herzls tremendous importance to Jewish history stemmed not only from having succeeded in creating an ideological infrastructure and organizational platform for the founding of a Jewish state, but also from having created new forms of Jewish existence around the world. A by-product of the enormous effort made by world Jewry to build a national home was the unification of the worldwide Jewish community as a political force seeking common goals and administering active institutions.

As the above citation indicates, the dramatic crisis that confronted the Jews of Europe from the latter half of the 1930s reinforced the conviction of Wise and his colleagues that it was essential to express the world view expounded in his 1929 lecture by founding a representative international Jewish organization. They maintained that it was necessary to found the WJC because the Zionist movement was primarily occupied with the affairs of Palestine, and this additional organization would thus be preoccupied with addressing the needs of world Jewry. The great majority of the founders of the WJC considered themselves to be Zionists, and some holding senior positions in the Zionist movement. They saw no contradiction between their Zionist leanings and activity within the WJC. They fought diligently for the establishment of a Jewish state, while at the same time striving to empower the ethnic identity of Diaspora Jews. As documented throughout this book, the organizations founders were well aware of the existence of Jewish philanthropic organizations that devoted their efforts toward the Jews of the Diaspora. Yet the founders of the WJC and its activists during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s believed that since these organizations operated as philanthropies they were unable to confront the Jews existential crisis that began in the 1930s. Thus, in contrast to other organizations, from its inception in 1936 to the outbreak of World War II the WJC involved itself in world and European politics worldwide, at the League of Nations, and with representatives of European governments as it attempted to ameliorate the condition of European Jewry and to create solutions for long-term migration.

The outbreak of war and reports of the extermination of Europes Jews induced WJC leadership and its operatives in neutral European countries to adopt modes of operation that were very different from the conventional patterns of philanthropic work in the Jewish public sphere. In this spirit they created a streamlined system for gathering information on the acts of murder and extermination in Europe, and set up a clandestine operation in neutral countries and in those under German occupation in order to rescue Jewish children and to facilitate the survival of Jews who had gone into hiding.

The discussion in this book of World Jewish Congress activities during the Holocaust reveals the complex and daunting challenges that the organizations leadership encountered during this period. The material presented here demonstrates that the WJC leaders did all that they could to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. This conclusion is at odds with the trenchant criticism, also described in this book, on the part of contemporaries and scholars alike, of the allegedly muted effort made by American Jewish leaders in general and the WJC leadership in particular to effect the rescue of Jews. As mentioned above, examination of the WJC program reveals that by 1946 its leaders were aware of this criticism and sought to make public the variety of actions taken by the organization on behalf of Europes Jews during the war years. The Congress maintained that these activities would only gain the recognition they deserved at some point in the future.

The explanation of these diverse assessments calls for an examination of the activities of Stephen Wise, Nahum Goldmann, and their colleagues in the leadership of the WJC within the American arena. Their activities should be appraised not merely as the actions of Jewish leaders, but also as those of American Jewish leaders who operated within the political and social milieu of the United States. While they were dissatisfied with the level of the Roosevelt administrations commitment to the rescue of European Jews, they understood that it was subject to the constraints inherent to American politics in the first half of the 1940s. They believed that it would be unwise to exert excessive public pressure on President Roosevelt to take action to rescue European Jews, and sought to understate the presidents engagement in the Jewish dilemma. Their intention was to protect Roosevelt from being presented as a friend of the Jews and as having led the United States into the war in response to Jewish pressure rather than out of concern for American interests. Wise, Goldmann, and their colleagues sought to create a durable association between the issue of Jewish rescue and the inevitable American victory in the war; thus they downplayed the presence of the Jewish issue in the American public sphere. They believed that there was no need to intensify Jewish activity by, for example, convening press conferences and demonstrations designed specifically to promote the rescue of European Jewry. The operation to rescue children orchestrated from Lisbon and the political steps taken on behalf of the Jewish communities of Denmark, Bulgaria, and Hungary were thus conducted clandestinely behind the scenes, in keeping with the policy of restraint that dictated the Congresss actions during World War II.