Current Events > Einstein thanks America for helping Jews escape Nazi Germany.

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Woman says she kept missive to her father locked away for 50 years. 'I wanted to show it to my children and grandchildren. Every contribution, no matter how small, is important'

A chicago woman has revealed a letter Albert Einstein sent her father, thanking him for his efforts to rescue Jews from Nazi Germany. Enid Bronstein told Chicagos WGN TV that Einstein sent the missive to her father David Finck in June 1939, before the start of World War II, as many Jews tried to flee Hitlers regime.

Finck, a New York financier, helped fund the emmigration of several such refugees. May I offer my sincere congratulations to you on the splendid work you have undertaken on behalf of the refugees, Einstein said in the letter.

The power of resistance which has enabled the Jewish people to survive for thousands of years has been based to a large extent on traditions of mutual helpfulness, he wrote. We have no other means of self-defense than our solidarity and our knowledge that the cause for which we are suffering is a momentous and sacred cause.

He added: It must be a source of deep gratification to you to be making so important a contribution toward rescuing our persecuted fellow Jews from their calamitous peril and leading them toward a better future.

WGN TV said the German-born physicist is known to have penned several such letters in 1939. Bronsteins is the third to surface. Bronstein said she had kept the letter locked away in a safety deposit box for the past 50 years.

I wanted to keep the letter to show it to my children and grandchildren so that they would get the message that every contribution, no matter how small, is important, she said.

She has now said she will donate the item to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Full Article: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/einstein-letter-surfaces-thanking-us-man-helping-jews-flee-nazi-germany/



What a nice guy
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And that man's name was Albert Einstein.
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Leaving aside the fact that Einstein was thanking an American rather than America, I'm wondering how he must have felt about Uncle Sam's somewhat less than stellar record on admitting Jewish survivors of the Holocaust after WW2.

Between 1945 and 1952, only about 16,000 Jewish displaced persons (DPs) were admitted to the United States under the Truman Directive and another 68,000 under the two Displaced Persons Acts. The first of those two Acts wasn't signed until June 1948 -- meanwhile, 222,000 Jews had been sitting in DP camps in the US zones of Germany and Austria for about a year. Fast work, guys!

In fact it had been hard enough to push even this small measure through Congress and the Senate. Congress had had to be reassured that 80% of DPs were Christians so it didnt grumble too much about the Truman Directive; it didnt want too many visas handed out to Jews. Truman himself condemned the restrictionist provisions of the Wiley-Rivercomb Bill when he reluctantly signed it on June 25, 1948 as "flagrantly discriminatory" and "anti-semitic". Several provisions had been purposely designed to exclude Jewish DPs, and the Anti-Defamation League demanded the Bill be vetoed.
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"America only saved tens of thousands of Jews from the Nazis! Fucking scum!"

Wut...
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It's not as if Uncle Sam launched some colossal rescue mission to save Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia before the doors finally closed in 1942. The annual quota of immigrants admitted from Germany -- the origin of most Jewish emigrants at risk under Nazi rule until the war broke out -- remained unchanged from its 1924 ceiling of 25,927 until it was merged with the Austrian quota in April 1938, totalling 27,370 per year.

Uncle Sam's performance, relative to capacity, was miserly compared to that of other countries. Roughly 136,000 immigrants to the US between 1933 and October 1939 came from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia -- although not all of them would have been Jews, of course. In the same period, around 50,000 from the same countries of origin were admitted to Britain; but while Britain is only about 6% the size of the US, it took in 36% of the American figure. In other words, Britain took a much bigger share relative to her size.

While we hear a lot about how British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine supposedly slammed the door in the face of Jewish refugees from Europe, US immigration quotas after the policy changes of 1921-24 impacted far more harshly on Jews' chances of escaping Europe than Britain's Palestine policy did. (In fact, the only British immigration quotas in Palestine prior to the ordinance of 1937 were for so-called 'Category C' applicants -- those who had no capital of their own to bring with them but who had a definite prospect of work.) Mandate Palestine was only the size of Maryland, but between 1933 and 1939 the Mandate authorities admitted 204,076 (legally registered) Jewish immigrants -- or 25% more Jews than the United States did. In fact as a proportion of existing population, Palestine admitted 117 times as many Jews as the US. Yet on Internet forums, people still have the nerve (but no sense of irony) to bang on about how more Jews would be alive in the world today if only those terrible arch-antisemites, the Arabs of Palestine, had welcomed more Jews with open arms.

If I felt uncharitable, I could say that the wealthiest country in the world, with the largest, wealthiest and most influential Jewish community in the world, took in a disproportionately smaller share of pre-war Jewish immigrants than a far poorer country 257 times smaller. So, y'know, maybe let's not get too caught up in all the back-slapping for Uncle Sam.
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Southernfatman posted...

And that man's name was Albert Einstein.

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