Three "rich uncles in America": the Australian Immigration Project and American Jewry.
Rutland, Suzanne D. ; Encel, Sol
In 1945, after the Holocaust, the majority of surviving European
Jews wished to leave the continent and start a new life far from the
scene that had become for them a mass graveyard. Most wished to emigrate
either to Palestine or to the United States, but for some, distant
Australia seemed a hopeful refuge. In the period between 1945 and 196i
approximately 25,000 Jewish displaced persons (DPs) established a new
life at "the edge of the diaspora," continuing a trend that
had begun in the late 1930s when the first refugees fleeing Nazism
arrived in Australia. (1) In 1933, there were only 23,000 Jews in
Australia, according to official census figures. Between 1938 and 1961,
the community almost tripled in size to 61,000 and by 2008 had grown to
105,000. (2) The Holocaust survivors of this period who found refuge in
Australia completely changed the nature of the Jewish community.
However, the Australian government ensured that the number of Jews did
not exceed 0.5 per cent of the overall population because of antirefugee
hysteria. (3) As a result of this sentiment against Jewish immigrants,
the Australian government, both Labor and Liberal, insisted that the
reception and integration of the refugees was the responsibility of the
Jewish community. No government funds were expended on Jews because of
the fear of a political backlash. Sponsors of the refugees were
responsible for accommodating the newcomers and helping those in need
find their feet in a new land. The Australian Jewish Welfare Societies
(AJWS) in Sydney and the Australian Jewish Welfare and Relief Society
(AJW&RS) in Melbourne directly sponsored some of the refugees and
acted as a backup service for those sponsored privately but requiring
assistance. Boats were met, immigrants were helped with finding
employment or setting up in business through interest free loans and two
different schemes were established to assist orphan survivors of the
Holocaust who wished to immigrate to Australia. This was too immense an
undertaking for Australian Jews to finance alone, so they appealed to
overseas Jewish communities, particularly in the United States, for
assistance. The absorption of Jewish immigrants into Australia in the
postwar era became a joint enterprise between the local and overseas
Jewish communities in what became known as "The Australian
Immigration Project."
Three American Jewish welfare organizations in particular
facilitated this project: the American Jewish Joint Distribution
Committee (JDC), the Refugee Economic Corporation (REC), and the Hebrew
Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). The active involvement of these
organizations--referred to by one observer as the "three rich
uncles"--is a good illustration of how the Jewish community in the
United States emerged as the leader of world Jewry after 1945 and was
the driving force in the relocation of Europe's surviving Jewish
remnant to both Palestine/Israel and throughout the English-speaking
world. (4)
The JDC was founded in 1914 in the United States to facilitate the
transfer of funds raised to assist Jews across Europe and in Palestine
who were suffering from hunger, poverty, and dislocation as a result of
World War I. The organization's leaders were members of the most
prominent families of the American Jewish establishment. The founding
chairman, Felix M. Warburg, was a member of the investment firm of Kuhn,
Loeb, and Company, and the son-in-law of the firm's senior partner,
philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff. Warburg headed the JDC from 1914 until
1932 (his son, Edward M. M. Warburg, served as chairman from 1941 to
1966). After World War I, the JDC continued to provide massive financial
support for basic needs of Jews affected by the conflict, as well as for
the reconstruction efforts of Jewish communities. Later, after
reconstruction needs diminished, it extended its brief to help Jews
overseas who were struggling under the economic turmoil that eventually
spiralled into the world financial crisis of the late 1920s and 1930s.
Through these various stages of development, the organization became
"a way of life to those active in it," wrote JDC historian
Oscar Handlin. "Its structure reached deeply into every sector of
Jewish life." (5) In the post-World War II period, the JDC played a
major role in Jewish resettlement, providing financial assistance,
logistical skills, and human sympathy. It also provided employment to
many Jewish survivors in Europe. Of its staff of 2500, only 10 percent
were Americans. As Leonard Dinnerstein has claimed, "no other
voluntary agency, Jewish, Gentile or non-sectarian, could compare with
the JDC in accomplishment." (6)
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
The Refugee Economic Corporation (REC) was formed in 1934 to aid in
the resettlement and rehabilitation of refugees from Nazi Germany and,
subsequently, from other parts of German-occupied Europe. The prime
mover of the REC was JDC founder Felix M. Warburg, who led the
organization until his death in 1937, when he was succeeded as president
by Charles J. Liebman. Unlike other agencies involved in refugee work
during this period, the REC operated on a business model rather than on
that of a philanthropic organization. According to its 1949 annual
report, it avoided "short-term relief" in favor of investment
in long-term resettlement projects that were
"self-liquidating." This investment often came in the form of
loans to business enterprises that employed refugees and allowed them to
develop and showcase skills seen as useful by the governments of host
countries. (7) In order to supplement its work, the REC created an
ancillary organization, the Emigre Charitable Fund, which helped finance
activities that fell outside the corporation's business-oriented
charge. From the 1930s through the postwar period, the REC established
loan funds not only in European locations where Jewish refugees had
gathered, but also in many of the countries identified as major sites
for refugee resettlement: Australia, South Africa, British Honduras,
Costa Rica, Palestine, the Philippines, and a number of South American
nations. In some of these locations it assisted in the establishment of
Jewish agricultural colonies. (8) By the late 1940s, the funds raised by
the REC were fully invested in these various projects so that its
resources were fully extended. In 1953, after the majority of survivors
had been resettled, the organization amalgamated with the JDC.
HIAS was founded in 1902 by newly arrived Russian Jews to assist
their fellow immigrants to the United States who were fleeing poor
economic conditions and, in some cases, pogroms. After restrictive
immigration quotas were introduced in the United States in 1924, HIAS
began to concentrate its efforts on other activities, aiding immigrants
in settling in other countries and working more closely with
international Jewish aid agencies to give training and support to
European Jews in preparation for emigration. (9) Compared with the other
organizations discussed, HIAS was smaller in size and its leadership was
more exclusively focused on assisting Jews in eastern Europe. In the
aftermath of World War II, it was particularly active in Poland. At
times its activities overlapped with those of the JDC, although efforts
were made to avoid duplication. (10)
In the postwar era, the Jewish relief agencies had the most
significant resources of all organizations assisting DPs in Europe, both
in terms of funding and personnel. They sought to meet the needs of Jews
in the DP camps, not only in terms of relocation, but also in providing
food, clothing, childcare, and schooling, until their clients were able
to leave Europe." Although some scholarly work has been undertaken
on the reception of Jewish refugees in the United States itself, to date
very little has been written about the ways in which American Jewry
assisted the Australian Immigration Project." (12) There is very
little about Australia and almost nothing about the postwar immigration
in the major history of the JDC by Yehuda Bauer, and the same is true of
the histories of HIAS. (13) A major reason for the lack of knowledge of
this cooperative endeavor is that throughout the project, the key
officials insisted on secrecy regarding American Jewish assistance for
fear that this information would play into the hands of the anti-Jewish
immigration campaign in Australia. Thus, in May 1947 at a meeting
between the REC's president, Charles Liebman, and key JDC officials
including chairman Edward M. M. Warburg, Liebman stressed that "no
leak in New York [concerning American funding to Australia] should occur
since it will embarrass the present Australian government very
much." (14) In response, Louis H. Sobel, speaking on behalf of the
JDC, assured Liebman that it would not publicize the aid it would give.
This stress on secrecy was repeated throughout the period until 1954. By
utilizing the relevant sources in American, Australian, and Israeli
archives, this article brings this little-known story of international
cooperation to light and adds a new dimension to our understanding of
survivor migration in the immediate postwar period.
American Quotas and Jewish DPs, 1945-1952
Throughout the English-speaking world after 1945, including the
United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia, there was a fear of an
influx of Jewish survivors fuelled by xenophobia and antisemitism in
these countries. As noted by Irving Abella and Harold Troper in their
study of Canadian responses to the refugee crisis, the Western world was
"prepared to eulogize the Jews; it was not prepared to offer them a
new home." (15) Jews were seen as undesirable because they were
considered "clannish, aggressive and cosmopolitan," a group
that did not assimilate easily and whose loyalty would always be
suspect. (16) They were also associated with Communism, because of the
left-leaning position of many Jews, and with terrorism, because of the
conflict between the Yishuv (Jewish settlement) and the British in
Palestine. As a result, many citizens of these countries felt that
Jewish refugees should be kept out, despite the fact that native-born
Jewish citizens often enjoyed significant levels of acceptance and
integration. Politicians did not support a broadening of Jewish refugee
immigration because of their fear of a political backlash and they were
largely supported in these policies by cooperative government officials.
(17)
After Germany's surrender in May 1945, there were negative
reactions to Jewish displaced persons from members of both the American
and British armies. From the outset, explains Michael Marrus, Jews
liberated from concentration camps were so degraded that "an abyss
separated inmates of camps like Dachau from the rest of humanity....
However horrified, the liberators failed to see the victims as fellow
creatures." (18) Despite this military dislike of Jews, the British
government avoided introducing any notion of Jewish particularity into
their official policies, because of their desire to prevent Jewish
refugees from having any claim to Palestine. Jewish survivors initially
were grouped together with non-Jews and every effort was made to
repatriate them to eastern Europe. When these efforts failed and Jewish
refugees began to stream back to the West in response to anti-Jewish
excesses, the British restricted Jewish entry into their zone so that
most sought to enter the American zone.
Despite the stream of DPs entering the American zone, fear of an
influx of displaced persons in the United States combined with
anti-semitic feelings to limit the number of Jewish DPs permitted to
enter the country. In December 1945, President Harry S. Truman responded
in a humanitarian manner by issuing a special directive permitting the
resumption of quota immigration to the United States from the areas of
greatest need. In addition, a "corporate affidavit" was
introduced, guaranteeing the pledge given by voluntary
agencies--including the main Jewish welfare organizations--that
sponsored immigrants would not become a charge on the state, (19))
Because of the strong financial position of Jewish agencies, this
directive favored Jewish refugees. (20) Between May 1946, when the first
refugee ship arrived, until June 1948, when a new act came into
operation, Jews constituted two-thirds of the 41,379 people admitted
under the program, although the scheme was met with a nativist and
antisemitic reaction. For example, shortly after Truman's policy on
refugees was announced, an attorney for the Citizen's Committee on
Displaced Persons noted that "the general sentiment in Congress at
the present ... [is] still too hostile, particularly because of the
feeling that too many Jews would come into the country if immigration
regulations were relaxed." (21) In November 1946, Republican
William Chapman Revercomb visited Europe to investigate DP conditions.
Although he praised the non-Jewish DPs from the Baltic states, his
report was very critical of the Jewish DPs, whom he associated with
Communists. Revercomb, who in 1948 assumed the chairmanship of the U.S.
Senate's immigration subcommittee, predicted that it was "very
doubtful that any country would desire these [Jewish] people as
immigrants." (22)
These sentiments were reflected in the June 1948 passage of the
Displaced Persons Act, with which the U.S. Congress permitted a quota of
205,000 DPs to immigrate to the United States over the subsequent two
years, but in which were included provisions that worked against the
entry of Jewish refugees. The act defined a displaced person as one who
had been in a DP camp since December 22, 1945. (23) According to Leonard
Dinnerstein, this decision "reflected the lawmakers' desire to
exclude Jews," the majority of whom had not come west from Russia
or Poland until 1946 and 1947. In fact, more than 85 percent of Jewish
DPs were rendered ineligible for admission to the United States under
the 1948 act because of their late date of arrival in the American,
British, or French zones. (24) The act also stipulated that 30 percent
of entrance visas be given to agricultural workers, who had to agree to
continue as farmers in the United States. (25) This disadvantaged the
Jewish DPs, as few of them were farmers. (26) In addition, 40 percent of
the DPs had to come from areas annexed by the Soviet Union after the
war, meaning mainly the Baltic countries and the Ukraine, areas where
the vast majority of Jews had been murdered. As a result, most DPs who
qualified under this provision were non-Jews, including some Nazi
collaborators. At the same time, the volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans who
had lived in the East and had fled to Germany, enjoyed advantages under
the act, since they were accepted as part of the German quota, could
apply for a visa if they had reached West Germany by July 1, 1948, and
did not need an employment and housing guarantee, which was required for
other DPs. With the introduction of the new act, 23,000 European
DPs--mostly Jews--who had already been given preliminary approval to
resettle in the United States were disqualified. Only the remaining
thirty thousand Jewish refugees in the U.S. Zone who met the new cut off
date were allowed to proceed as planned.
The American Jewish leadership was horrified by the Displaced
Persons Act of 1948, which it saw as antisemitic. Ironically, Jewish
leaders such as philanthropist and refugee advocate Lessing J.
Rosenwald, American Jewish Committee spokesman Irving M. Engel, and
secretary of the Citizens' Committee on Displaced Persons, William
S. Bernard, had campaigned for the passage of the act because they
wanted to help Jewish DPs. They did not foresee the way in which the
final version would actually further limit opportunities for Jewish
immigration to the United States." (27)
Circumstances for Jewish refugees seeking entrance to the United
States improved somewhat in June 1950, when the cut-off date was
extended to include DPs who had arrived in the camps by January 1949.
Despite this liberalization, however, U.S. policy continued to reflect
the influence of opponents of Jewish immigration to the United States,
most notably Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada. As head of the Senate
Judiciary Committee, McCarran had worked vigorously against the
admission of Jewish DPs in the years following the war. The accusations
of criminal and communistic activity he had frequently made against
Jewish refugees had a lasting impact on American officials in Europe,
even after the 1950 expansion of the DP act, resulting in ongoing
administrative barriers to Jewish admission. Most significantly,
however, McCarran's success at delaying congressional action on the
DP question by whatever means possible in the years leading up to the
1950 revision meant that by the time the cut-off date was adjusted, the
prospect of resettling in the United States was no longer an option for
many Jewish refugees; they had already been forced by their dire
circumstances to resettle in other, often less desirable, locations.
(28) Thus, despite the knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust after
1945, the United States admitted only about 140,000 Jewish survivors,
most of whom successfully reestablished their lives in America. (29) The
options available to Jewish DPs were also limited by the restrictive
practices of other governments. Similar policies that favored non-Jewish
immigrants from the Baltic countries and discriminated against Jewish
survivors were introduced in Britain and Canada, while South Africa
continued its policy of excluding European Jews introduced in 1936. (30)
The refusal of the United States government to accept more Jewish
survivors led the American Jewish welfare organizations to assist other
countries prepared to sponsor Jewish DPs. While most of this support was
initially directed to DP immigration to Palestine and, after May 1948,
to the newly created State of Israel, there was also interest in
supporting immigration to Australia, Canada, and some Latin American
countries, all of which had slightly more liberal immigration policies
than the United States, despite the presence of anti-immigrant and
antisemitic attitudes. (31) The key organizations, the JDC, REC, and
HIAS, took an interest in all these destinations as places that would
allow Jewish DPs to leave behind the horrors of Europe as quickly as
possible.
Australia: Administrative Discrimination and the Need for Funding
After 1945, the Australian Labor government permitted some Jewish
DP immigration, on the condition that all the required funding would
come from the Jewish community. As such, the Australian policy was
officially somewhat more liberal than in the United States. However,
when the Labor government was faced with an antisemitic reaction to
their immigration policy, the minister of immigration sought to reduce
the number of Jewish DPs coming to Australia. This reduction was
achieved through administrative measures introduced by the Department of
Immigration, at times secretly, rather than through official
legislation, which would have had to be passed by the federal
parliament.
In Australia, the ideology of racial hierarchy was intertwined with
immigration policy in ways that had mixed results for Jews. On the one
hand, the country's core division between whites and nonwhites made
the government open to accepting, in the words of a 1944 report of a
subcommittee on immigration, "any white aliens who can be
assimilated and contribute satisfactorily to economic development and
against whom there are no objections on the grounds of health, character
or (while the ban is still in force) enemy alien nationality." (32)
On the other hand, all white immigrants were not seen as alike. The same
subcommittee, for example, detailed a hierarchy of desirable
nationalities, which apart from the British--who were understood as
clearly the most desirable--were, in order of preference: Americans,
Scandinavians (Norwegians, Swedes, Danes), Dutch, Belgians, Swiss,
Yugoslavs, Greeks, and Albanians.
Jews were ranked at the very bottom of the committee's
European hierarchy. In describing the 7000-8000 refugees--mostly German
and Austrian Jews--who had been admitted to Australia in the 1930s
before the outbreak of war, the 1944 report underscored what it
considered their negative social traits. "Most of them, probably 80
per cent," the report estimated, "settled in Sydney and
Melbourne and soon became conspicuous by their tendency to acquire
property and settle in particular districts." (33) The committee
also pointed out that the professional and university-educated class of
Jewish refugees had greater difficulty in settling in Australia than the
artisan class. In addition, it concluded that Polish Jews, many of whom
had arrived prior to 1938 and settled as textile workers in Melbourne,
"could not be regarded as desirable types of migrants." (34)
Thus, while Australian immigration policy gave some preference to Jews
as whites, Jewish immigrants were depicted as less desirable than any
other European immigrants.
A 1948 study, carried out by Oscar A. Oeser and Samuel B. Hammond,
showed that the general Australian public perceived a similar hierarchy
in regard to postwar immigration. Within a hierarchy of race, Germans
ranked second in desirability after English immigrants, while Jews were
ranked seventh just above blacks, who were excluded along with other
nonwhites from immigration to Australia under what was known as the
"White Australia Policy." (35) Two years later, an opinion
poll showed 61 percent in favor of the immigration of carefully picked
Germans, with only 35 percent against. (36) These attitudes did not
change during the 1950s. The 1959 study of Newtown, the small satellite
town near Perth in Western Australia, showed that respondents not only
ranked the desirability of Jewish immigrants far below that of Germans,
but also below that of much less favored arrivals from southern Europe.
(37)
Similar attitudes were also expressed in the popular culture and
media of the period. Among the major vehicles for anti-Jewish
stereotypes were cartoons published in newspapers, which depicted Jews
as members of a separate race who were incapable of assimilating. Some
images focused on Jewish economic life, accusing Jews of undermining
Australian living standards by working long hours in sweatshops for low
wages. Conversely, they were charged with being moneylenders who
controlled the banks and the media. In addition, Jews were often
portrayed as a godless people, lacking moral principles and intent on
destroying Christianity. Above all, Jews were cast as physically
undesirable--fat and ugly with hooked noses and foreign accents. While
the word 'Jew' did not always appear in the text accompanying
the cartoons, the use of these stereotypes made it clear that they were
the target of the critique. Thus, despite the fate of European Jews
during World War II, anti-Jewish sentiments continued to manifest
themselves in the Australian media. (38)
Reflecting the impact of these images and attitudes, Australian
government policy continued to treat German immigrants as
"desirable," while tending to approach Jewish immigrants as
"undesirable." (39) As a result, only 25,000 Jewish survivors
were admitted to Australia from 1945 to 1961, less than one-third the
number of non-Jewish German immigrants who arrived during the same
period. Though quotas limiting refugee resettlement were introduced
through administrative procedures rather than through legislation, they
often targeted Jewish arrivals in a more explicit way than did the
formal DP legislation in the United States. In 1947, for example,
immigration officials aimed to stop the chartering of ships to bring
Jewish refugees to Australia--a practice that had been initiated at the
beginning of the Jewish refugee effort--by limiting the number of Jews
on each incoming vessel to 25 percent of the total passengers. This rule
was later extended to airplanes as well. In 1948, when government
officials believed that too many Jews were still arriving, they
negotiated a "gentleman's agreement" with the Jewish
community that increased the ship quota to 50 percent, but allowed a
total of no more than 3000 European Jews to be admitted per annum. In
1949, when the limit was exceeded with the arrival of 3800 Jewish DPs,
the government introduced an "Iron Curtain Embargo," which
excluded arrivals from countries under Communist rule. While the measure
was introduced ostensibly for security reasons, it was intended to
reduce the flow of European Jews to Australia, since most Jews were
coming from Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. The intention
underlying the embargo became clear from the way in which the flow of
Jews was monitored by a question on the sponsorship form specifically
asking if the sponsored person was Jewish, and by the institution of
medical examinations intended to detect if males were circumcised. (40)
In addition, Jews were excluded from the government-sponsored DP
program. (41) Secret instructions to recruitment officers stressed:
"There appears to be some doubt as to the meaning of the term Jew
in relation to the Displaced Persons Scheme ... The term refers to race
and not to religion and the fact that some D.P.s who are Jewish by race
have become Christian by religion is not relevant." (42)
There was a clear nexus between the perceived desirability of an
immigrant group and the level of assistance provided by the Australian
government. In 1966, Australian demographer and migration expert Charles
Price pointed out the differences in government funding for immigrant
groups. For example, northern European postwar immigrants, who were seen
as desirable, received more government funding than immigrants from
Greece and Italy, who were perceived as less desirable. Thus, the
Australian government assisted about three-quarters of German and
two-thirds of Dutch postwar immigrants. In comparison, the government
assisted only 16 percent of Italians and 33 percent of Greeks. (43)
Some Australian Jewish leaders quickly realized that Jewish
survivor migration to Australia had to be sponsored by the Jewish
community. As early as February 1946, Dr. Max Joseph, a prewar refugee
and president of the Association of Refugees, wrote to HIAS: "The
official attitude of the Australian Government is that with regard to
our people their job is finished the moment they issue permits. They are
not prepared to give financial or other assistance as they will do with
regard to immigrants who will come to Australia under their--not yet
defined--general Immigration Scheme." (44) As Gisela Kaplan has
argued of this period, "if given a choice the majority of
Australians wanted little or nothing to do with Jews." (45) As a
result, the Australian government did not want to expend any funds on
Jewish immigration. Jews had to pay for their own transportation costs
and--in the case of married couples and families--have their
accommodation guaranteed by sponsors. This funding was covered by
survivors' families who were already in Australia, assisted by the
JDC, the REC, and HIAS. In September 1948, Labor minister for
immigration, Arthur Calwell, even forbade the International Refugee
Organization (IRO) from continuing to provide transportation subsidies
to JDC and HIAS for the Jewish community-sponsored program, insisting
that the Jewish groups cover all costs on their own. The IRO funding was
eventually renewed in 1951, but Calwell's Liberal Party successor,
Harold Holt, refused to backdate this agreement, preventing it from
offsetting any expenses already covered by the Jewish organizations.
Thus, without the outside funding and assistance offered by American
Jewish welfare organizations, Australian Jewry would not have been in
the position to take in the Holocaust survivors who so significantly
reinforced the community. Australian Jewish leaders continued to stress
the small size of Australian Jewry before the influx of prewar refugees
and the need for outside financial assistance. As one letter stated:
"In such a small community the quantity of funds is not very
large." (46)
The fact that Australian Jews turned to their American counterparts
reflected a general trend in Australian society away from dependence on
Great Britain and toward greater participation in the American orbit.
This change in Australia's orientation started in the 1930s, but
was consolidated by America's key role in defending Australia after
the attack on Pearl Harbor, particularly in the 1942 Battle of the Coral
Sea, which stemmed Japanese expansion across the South Pacific. American
soldiers were based in Australia during the war, in the postwar years
this nexus was formalized in the Australia, New Zealand, United States
Security Treaty (ANZUS) of 1952. Relationships between Jewish
communities in different countries mirrored these larger trends. After
the Nazi destruction of European Jewry, American Jewry emerged as the
largest diaspora community. Australian Jewry's appeal to its
American counterpart was, therefore, part of a larger shift in the
balance of power from Europe to the United States in the postwar world.
Leaving Europe Behind
With the end of the war, Australian Jewish leaders immediately
established contact with their American counterparts. Through the United
Jewish Overseas Relief Fund (UJORF), which had been established during
the war in both Melbourne and Sydney, funds were raised and goods
purchased to send to Europe to assist Jewish survivors. Much of this
effort was coordinated through the JDC. Despite the fact that the
Australian Jewish population was about equally divided between the two
largest cities, the Melbourne branch of the UJORF was much more
effective than its counterpart in Sydney, with Melbourne raising 75,000
[pounds sterling] in 1946, compared with Sydney's 2,5,000. (47) The
larger role Melbourne played in this effort reflected the strength there
of Polish Jews, most of whom had arrived in Australia in the 1920s and
1930s, and who because of their origins and their comparatively recent
experiences with immigration were more empathetic toward the refugees
than was the longer settled Anglo-Jewish population. (48)
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]
The UJORF supplemented the work undertaken by the Australian Jewish
Welfare Societies (AJWS), branches of which had been established in 1936
in Melbourne and Sydney to deal with the Jewish refugee crisis in prewar
Europe. Unlike the AJWS, which was led in both cities by Anglo-Jews,
however, the UJORF was dominated by the Polish contingent. These
differences soon led to tensions between the two organizations,
especially in Melbourne where the Polish Jews were best positioned to
assert their influence. Ultimately, in 1947, the president of the UJORF,
Bialystok native Leo Fink, was able to also assume control of the
Melbourne branch of the AJWS, which under his leadership merged with the
UJORF to form a new organization, the Australian Jewish Welfare &
Relief Society (AJW&RS). Meanwhile, in Sydney, the old, established
leadership continued to control the AJWS while UJORF faded away. These
complex organizational dynamics, and the obstacles they often posed to
cooperation between the Sydney and Melbourne communities, would become a
significant factor in determining the course of the Australian
Immigration Project as it took shape. (49)
The postwar effort to bring Jewish refugees to Australia dated back
to 1946, when Australian Jewry asked for assistance from the JDC and
HIAS in coordinating Jewish immigration. As an initial stimulus, the
UJORF in Melbourne--before its transformation into the
AJW&RS--offered to cover 50 percent of the travel expenses for
families who could not pay their own fare if the JDC would pay the other
half. (50) Each immigrant who was assisted in this manner was asked to
sign a promissory note certifying that they would repay these funds as
soon as they were able. These amounts were then to be refunded to the
JDC as survivors or their families reimbursed the local Australian
organizations for their fares. Thus, in line with the JDC's general
policy, the financial assistance provided by the American welfare
organizations was given in the form of interest-free loans, rather than
as charity.
The actual task of moving hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors
who did not wish to remain in Europe was undertaken by the JDC and, to a
lesser extent, by HIAS. Because each family had to apply for emigration,
wait until they received a visa or landing permit, and then organize
transportation to their new homeland, the resettlement process was dealt
with on a case-by-case basis. For many, immigrating to the new state of
Israel was the only option. For others, havens in the New World
beckoned. Yet survivors sought to come to Australia for a number of
reasons. Family reunion and chain migration were the primary factors,
ones reinforced by a government policy that limited new immigrants to
those who already had a relative in Australia who would sponsor them and
to those sponsored by the Australian Jewish welfare societies. Other
survivors wanted to get as far away from Europe as they could. Indeed,
by 1948 officials of the JDC were stating that "ever since we
announced the 'Australian Project' we have been swamped with
applications." (51)
The role played by the American Jewish welfare organizations was
central in this entire process. They assisted the Jewish survivors in
camps in Europe, booked passages for individual families, organized
transit visas, provided transport to ports of embarkation, and booked
accommodation for those who needed to wait for their ship's
departure. In the years before the administrative quotas prevented it,
they also chartered entire ships to transport Jewish immigrants. In
addition to basic maintenance and transportation expenses, they covered
costs related to passports and visas and provided pocket money to the
immigrants for use while on board ship. (52) Virtually everyone who
chose to immigrate to Australia was assisted in this way by either the
JDC or HIAS.
The American Jewish welfare organizations paid in bulk for their
clients travelling on each ship. In 1946 the Australian Jewish
leadership requested that these organizations help arrange the
transportation for refugees whose families had obtained immigration
permits for them and were willing to pay the costs, but needed
assistance in organizing the travel. "We would . . . appreciate
your directing your European representatives to finance transportation
in all those cases where they receive a cable or written direction from
us," explained UJORF official I. Feiglin to the JDC. "In every
case we will immediately, upon receipt of a statement or cable showing
the exact cost, collect that amount from the relatives here and hold it
in account for you." (53) This proposal was accepted and the JDC
regularly transferred sums of $30,000 to $40,000 to shipping agents in
New York and Switzerland to pay for the passages. (54) The agents dealt
with a number of shipping companies, including Flotta Lauro in Naples,
Lloyd Triestino in Trieste, Consolidated Tours in New York, the
Tidewater Commercial Company in Baltimore, and the Holland-Australia
Line in Rotterdam. In some cases, planes were also chartered for travel
from both Europe and Shanghai. When relatives paid the fares, these
funds were then deposited in bank accounts in Australia, in trust for
the JDC.
The chartering of the SS Tidewater in 1947 is a good example of the
work required to bring survivors to Australia. Lewis Neikrug, the head
of the HIAS office in Paris, decided that the best way to deal with the
shipping problems related to Australia was to charter a boat. (55) He
contacted Arne Larsson, a Swedish shipping agent then working in Paris,
who was able to procure an appropriate vessel from an Italian shipowner.
Neikrug personally went to Rotterdam to inspect the boat, which had
previously been used by the Panama Railway Company, to ensure that it
was seaworthy before he signed the contract. HIAS was to provide
$100,000 up front for the transportation of the Jewish passengers and
also for their food. The draft charter agreement included a sample
weekly menu, which even specified that "fruit at dinner will be
served if available" and afternoon tea was "to be served with
biscuits, or currant buns or pastry." (56) Larsson, as the agent
for this deal, received a commission of $11,000. (57)
The initial sailing of the Tidewater became the subject of much
controversy because it came just at the time the government imposed the
quota limiting Jewish passengers on all incoming ships to 25 percent.
Because Neikrug believed that orphaned children were outside the new
quota, he had booked a group of seventeen orphans on the Tidewater in
addition to the one hundred Jewish refugees who already constituted z5
percent of the ship's four hundred passengers. In September 1947,
Fred Blakeney, second secretary of the Australian embassy in Paris,
informed the Department of External Affairs in Canberra that the Jewish
quota would be exceeded on the Tidewater and insisted that the orphans
be removed. (58) Neikrug was extremely disturbed by this order and sent
the following cable to the UJORF's successor agency, the
AJW&RS, in Melbourne:
WHAT IS YOUR INFORMATION REGARDING THIS NEW UKASE, WHICH IS
TANTAMOUNT TO ASKING ME TO REMOVE SEVENTEEN IMMIGRANTS WHO ARE
PRACTICALLY ABOARD SHIP [?] ... BEAR IN MIND THAT IMMIGRANTS
ACCOMPANIED BY MY ASSOCIATES ARE IN MARSEILLES 800 KILOMETERS FROM
PARIS AND IT NOW BECOMES INCUMBENT ON ME TO MAKE CONTACT IN TIME
BEFORE SAILING ... PUZZLED AT THIS NEW RESTRICTION CONVEYED
SEPTEMBER TWENTIETH FOR SAILING SCHEDULED SEPTEMBER TWENTY-FIFTH.
(59)
Eventually the Australian government permitted the extra Jews to
sail on the Tidewater, but in return HIAS agreed that the next time they
sent passengers they would reduce their quota numbers by seventeen to
make up for the excess. (60)
The problem of booking passages on the ships was very complex
because the JDC and HIAS had limited funds to advance for the tickets
and there were many variables involved in the voyage depending on the
amount paid. Immigrants, for example, sometimes had to travel third
class if their families could not afford to pay for better tickets. As a
result, they had to make do with low-end accommodations--dormitories for
the men and basic cabins for the women and children. There were also
many logistical challenges to organizing such a vast human movement and
making sure that immigrants did not get off track at any point in the
several-stage journey. Passengers leaving from the Italian port of
Genoa, for example, arrived there by train and were accommodated in
comfortable hotels and pensions until their ship was ready to sail. In
order to be sure they reached their final destination successfully,
these immigrants were presented with a set of guidelines that instructed
them:
1) To watch their baggage the same way they watch their children
2) If they have excess baggage to attend to it themselves
3) Once in Genoa, not to undertake trips in Italy
4) To avoid contacting travel offices and unscrupulous agents
regarding improvements of accommodation
5) That Genoa office personnel is at their disposal
6) That all are treated equally as to ship accommodations
7) To advise relatives in Australia to meet them at port of
debarkation and to arrange inland transportation. (61)
Preparing the sailing lists also presented a complicated task, as
each person had to have their landing permit number and sponsor's
full name and address, and these lists had to be forwarded in advance to
Australia so that sponsors could be contacted and informed of arrival
dates.
Finally, recouping funds paid out in fares often proved more
difficult than anticipated. Welfare officials found that it was often
those who were less well-off who fulfilled their obligations, while
those who came with money or who were able to quickly reestablish
themselves financially were less likely to do so. (62) In the case of
those who did not repay their debts, the Australian Jewish leadership
wanted to take legal action, an issue they first proposed to their
American counterparts in 1948. (63) Initially the Americans opposed this
suggestion because they were concerned that "getting tough"
with court action would have a negative effect on public relations. (64)
They were also concerned that a negative court decision based on some
legal technicality could be very deleterious to the whole system of
financing the transportation because it might invalidate the right of
the organizations to recoup their expenses from immigrants. (65) Then,
in 1951, when this type of legal action was effectively pursued by the
Jewish community in the Republic of Colombia, where a number of Jewish
DPs had found sanctuary, the JDC changed its position. (66)
Subsequently, however, Australian Jewish officials realized that they
did not have legal grounds to take court action, since the promissory
notes had not been stamped and most had been left without a signature.
(67) While the JDC officials continued to express concern and there was
discussion about improving the legal documentation used for the
promissory notes, by this stage the flow of Jewish immigration to
Australia was slowing down. In the end, no formal legal action was ever
taken on this issue.
In addition to its involvement in funding and organizing the
general flow of refugees that made up the Australian Immigration
Project, the JDC was also involved with two more specialized programs
that brought orphaned Jewish children to Australia: the Save the
Children's Scheme, which aimed to sponsor three hundred children
under the age of twelve and raised 75,000 [pounds sterling]
(approximately $150,000) in 1943; and the Jewish Welfare Guardian
Scheme, which aimed at sponsoring one hundred youth in the older age
group. Finding children who would fit into the younger age group proved
very difficult, as most of the children under twelve had been murdered
during the Holocaust. Of those who survived, most had at least one
parent still living. While the JDC was initially reluctant to pursue the
goal of directing Jewish orphans to Australia, the local community
leadership consistently pressured the JDC leadership to support the
orphan program. The AJWS's general secretary, Walter Brand, wrote a
number of letters arguing that not all the children should go to
Palestine and that it was also important to build diaspora communities.
(68) Faced with this constant pressure and the fact that the Australian
Jewish community had specifically raised funds for this purpose, the JDC
agreed to support the orphan project. Eventually the project of finding
both orphaned children and young adults for Australia received
assistance from Union-OSE, an international federation of Jewish
organizations focused on the issues of health and child welfare. (69)
These young immigrants travelled in groups of ten to thirty under the
supervision of couples selected by the JDC. The first group travelled in
1947 on the SS Partizanka and was escorted by Dr. David Szeps, a Polish
Jewish medical practitioner from Tomaszow-Mazowiecki in central Poland,
and his wife. (70) The Szepses had survived the war by assuming
non-Jewish identities. A number of children in these groups claimed to
be younger than they actually were in order to be selected for
Australia.
Reception and Hostels in Australia
In addition to assisting with the entire process of bringing
survivors to Australian shores, American Jewish organizations became
deeply involved with financing the local reception activities, which
included providing hostel accommodation, English classes, advice about
employment, and interest-free loans to establish businesses. While
non-Jewish immigrants were initially housed in government camps, Jews
were required by law to have accommodation guaranteed either by family
or the Australian Jewish welfare societies. The only exception to this
policy was made for single Jews, who were not required to sign the
accommodation guarantee, as it was assumed that they would easily find
employment and would not have significant accommodation needs. (71)
Still, even single Jews were not housed in the government camps, unless
they were sponsored under the International Refugee Organization (IRO)
scheme, which initially did not accept Jews at all and later accepted
single Jews only. Since married couples and families made up the largest
part of the refugee population, however, the need for accommodation
guarantees became a major issue for the organizers of the Jewish
resettlement effort.
The following accommodation guarantee issued by the AJWS provides
an example of the specific assurances the government required:
The Australian Jewish Welfare Society will accommodate [name of
nominees] at our institutions. The provision of this accommodation
will entail the displacement of no existing Australian occupant and
will result in no unoccupied accommodation being reserved pending
the arrival of the nominees. Further, that any accommodation
secured will not prejudice the rights of ex-servicemen. (72)
The requirement of such guarantees was one of the many
administrative measures introduced by the government in its attempt to
limit the number of Jewish immigrants arriving in Australia. In fact,
from 1948 to 1950, married couples and families had to provide the exact
location of their accommodation in Australia--whether a private dwelling
or a Jewish welfare hostel--before they could receive their landing
permit, and they were required to remain in that specified accommodation
for at least six months. (73) While after 1950 the government eased its
demand for many of the specifics regarding the place and the duration of
accommodation for Jewish arrivals, it continued to require the
guarantees. (74) The establishment and management of immigrant hostels,
therefore, was a particularly important aspect of welfare society work
throughout the postwar years. In Melbourne, the work of the AJW&RS
in creating these hostels was assisted by various landsmanshaftn,
associations of immigrants from the same hometown in eastern Europe.
(75) Its 1950-1951 annual report stated that "without any
exaggeration ... if it was not for the existence of these hostels, we
would not be able to receive such a great number of immigrants."
(76)
In addition to their most basic function of helping the various
Jewish welfare societies meet the requirement of guaranteeing
accommodation, the hostels emerged for other reasons as well. First,
they served as needed transit stations for those immigrants heading to
more distant locations in Australia. Second, as is evident from the
phrasing used in the accommodation guarantees, the hostels were a means
of demonstrating that the refugees would not displace ex-servicemen who
were returning from Europe and were in need of housing. The Australian
Jewish community understood that it was important that Calwell, the
immigration minister, should not face a barrage of questions in
parliament on this issue. Finally, because of the particularly dire
economic situation of many of the immigrants, some of whom arrived
without basic necessities such as a change of clothing, there was a need
for a place where these services could be immediately provided. In this
regard, the situation of the postwar Jewish arrivals was different from
that of prewar refugees, many of whom used their funds in Germany to
purchase expensive clothes and goods that they were able to sell upon
their arrival in Australia. (77) Given the scope of the reception needs
of the incoming refugees, Australian Jewish leaders, irrespective of
geography or organizational affiliation, generally agreed that they
could not provide for all of these on their own. Still, the divide
between Polish-dominated Melbourne and the Anglo-Jewish stronghold of
Sydney was reflected in the approach of the two communities to immigrant
assistance, with the Sydney leadership typically asserting more vocally
the limits of what it could accomplish for Jewish refugees. This
attitude was apparent in an August 1947 letter from Saul Symonds, one of
the most eminent spokesmen for the Sydney community, to Moses Leavitt,
executive vice-president of the JDC in New York, in which he expresses a
sense of trepidation and doubt regarding the enormous tasks facing the
Australian sponsors of Jewish immigrant resettlement. "What
concerns us more than anything else," explained Symonds, "is
the fact that we will have to undertake some very large housing scheme,
because it will be impossible for us to arrange for the accommodation of
these migrants unless we do so." (78)
Despite some differences in tone, the need for financial assistance
from the American Jewish organizations became a persistent issue over
the years in both the Sydney and Melbourne communities. The Australians
explained that while they could organize local appeals for funds, there
was no way they could come anywhere near the level of funding required
for the ongoing, enormous enterprise of resettling survivors. The 23,000
Jewish community members who had roots in Australia predating 1933 were
not particularly wealthy by American standards, and the approximately
9000 European Jewish refugees who had arrived between 1938 and 1940 were
still reestablishing themselves in 1947 and were not in a position to
assist others. In addition, many of the prewar refugees were already
using any spare funds they had to assist family members who had survived
the Holocaust and had resettled in Australia after the war. Australian
tax law also made large fundraising difficult, as donations to
charitable concerns were not tax-deductible and Australian taxation
rates were higher than in other English-speaking countries. There was
also competition within the Jewish community for charitable dollars,
with Zionist fundraising scoring the greatest success in attracting
significant donations. (79) Indeed, in 1948 the Zionist appeal at the
time of the War of Independence raised 150,000 [pounds sterling], while
the Jewish Welfare Appeal raised only 25,614 [pounds sterling]. (80)
Australian Jewish leaders constantly emphasized how many survivors they
were sponsoring on a prorata basis to their prewar Jewish population,
and this became an ongoing refrain in their correspondence with the
American Jewish welfare organizations. "With an increase of 10,000
to our communities since 1946," Walter Brand wrote to JDC official
Moses Leavitt in 1950, "I respectfully point out that I know of no
democratic community throughout the world that has had such an increase
except, naturally, Israel." (81)
JDC leaders often responded negatively to such assertions, arguing
that the Australians "should try and shoulder their
responsibilities as much as possible without recourse to any financial
assistance on the part of the Joint." (82) In the end, however, the
Americans always did assist in the purchase of hostels and in the
providing of temporary care and interest-free loans for the newcomers.
They saw the funds they allocated as loans that were eventually to be
repaid by the Australians. There was to be a security for each hostel
purchased, with the idea that when the hostels were eventually sold, the
funds would be returned to the American organizations. In 1950, the JDC
leadership queried the Australians about the form of the security they
were to be given for such loans and wanted to ensure that they received
the same conditions as HIAS. (83) The JDC was also insistent that it
would not cover administrative expenses, including salaries. (84) In
order to assess whether the Australian requests for financial assistance
were justified and to ensure that the immigration process was proceeding
smoothly, the JDC sent a series of representatives to Australia.
Following their visits, these representatives wrote detailed reports,
which, although at times critical of the Australians, always recommended
support for their requests for assistance.
The first JDC representative to visit Australia was Gertrude Van
Tinj, who spent about four weeks there in December 1946 and January
1947. She commented on the prewar assistance the JDC had given to the
community through two different schemes. Mutual Farms was a program that
provided loans to assist refugees who wished to settle on the land and
also offered farm training at the Chelsea Training Park on the outskirts
of Sydney. Given that only a few refugees wanted to settle on the land,
and very few of those who did remained there, this scheme was not a
success and was not expanded after the war. In contrast, Mutual
Enterprises was established to provide interest-free loans to refugees
who wished to create factories and other businesses. Once successfully
established, the immigrants repaid their loans, so that the capital
invested in the program remained intact. (85)
Van Tinj's visit to Australia was followed by that of Charles
Jordan, the JDC representative in Shanghai, who came in August-September
1947, spending time in Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney and
meeting with immigration minister Calwell and other government figures,
as well as with key community leaders. Initially, the situation for
Jewish immigration to Australia looked very optimistic to Jordan,
particularly in light of Calwell's recent travels to Europe and the
United States, which seemed to sensitize him to the needs of Jewish
refugees, as well as his promise to facilitate Jewish migration from
Shanghai to Australia. During this trip, however, as Jordan learned more
about the ways in which Australian administrative policies increasingly
worked against a Jewish influx, he ultimately came to realize that
Jewish immigrants were not wanted by the government. At the same time,
he also gained a clearer understanding of the Jewish community's
needs in regard to refugee work, establishing a close connection with
Walter Brand, the general secretary of the Australian Jewish Welfare
Society in Sydney and the only trained social worker involved in the
Australian Immigration Project. Brand and Jordan maintained a personal
correspondence over many years, with Brand often pouring out his
despondency at the ongoing disappointments with Australian government
policy towards Jewish immigration.
After his departure, Jordan also wrote a long and detailed report
of his impressions of Australia. In both his letters and his report he
recommended a major restructuring of Australian Jewry's welfare
efforts and the sending of JDC representatives to Australia on a more
permanent basis in order to aid in this effort. It was necessary, he
explained, to teach the Jewish leadership there effective fundraising
methods, because they were "incompetent and amateurish in their ...
ideas." (86) These recommendations, however, were not implemented
and the JDC continued to send representatives for short periods only. In
1948, Moses Leavitt commiserated with Jordan about Australian
Jewry's poor fundraising capacity, agreeing that its "primary
need is for a first-rate fund-raiser, who may have to be sent from this
country." (87) No such plan was implemented, however, until the
mid-1960s.
In December 1948, Walter Brand wrote to Charles Liebman of the REC
stating that Australians needed a capital investment of 75,000 [pounds
sterling] ($250,000)--20,000 [pounds sterling] to purchase another
hostel in Sydney, 10,000 [pounds sterling] for repairs to the Chelsea
Park hostel, 20,000 [pounds sterling] for another hostel in Melbourne,
and 10,000 [pounds sterling] for efforts in Western Australia. The
Brisbane community had already spent 4,500 [pounds sterling] on its
resettlement activities and needed another 10,000 [pounds sterling].
(88) In 1949, in response to further requests for financial assistance,
the JDC leadership decided to send Emery Komlos, a Jewish social worker
and director of the REC, to investigate the situation and report back.
Komlos visited Australia in September as the representative of the JDC,
HIAS, and the REC, meeting with leaders in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth.
In a letter to Charles Liebman he stated:
I have been wonderfully received--as anyone would who apparently
has three "rich uncles in America"! The visits, meetings,
discussions, [and] dinners go on day and night. I have used the
plane trips to catch up on sleep and for making my notes on things
seen, said and done. Three weeks is barely sufficient for this
survey, but it will do. A week ago it was a fairly jumbled jig-saw
puzzle, but now the pieces are falling into place. (89)
Komlos wrote detailed minutes of all his meetings, and then flew
home via Paris, where he met with Jordan and produced a preliminary
report. He was tragically killed in a plane crash on his flight home to
New York. On the basis of his analysis of the problems and his
recommendations, however, the three organizations agreed to provide
$200,000 to Australian Jewry to establish hostels and provide loans to
individual refugees, with $120,000 of this total coming from the JDC,
$40,000 from HIAS, and $40,000 from the REC. (90) In Sydney, the funds
for loans were funnelled through Mutual Enterprises, which continued to
operate effectively in aiding newcomers in establishing businesses.
In spite of this generous allocation, Australian Jewry continued to
ask for additional funding. In 1951, Leavitt asked JDC official Adolph
C. "Cook" Glassgold, who had been in Shanghai, to visit
Australia. (91) Brand wrote stating that they were curtailing their
activities until after this visit because of their lack of funds.
However, after his visit to Australia, Glassgold wrote a very critical
report, claiming that the local communities could raise more funds for
themselves. He described the community as well-off, and argued that with
full employment, immigrants to Australia should not need additional help
from U.S. Jewry. As he put it, "Since anyone who wants can get a
job, it isn't long before he is able to paddle his own canoe and
put a little aside for stormy weather." (92) As a result, he
stressed that loans could be fully repaid in a short time and
recommended cutting the Australia budget from 88,000 [pounds sterling]
to 26,000 [pounds sterling], which would be a one-time grant for hostel
maintenance. (93) This recommendation was approved by the JDC board, but
provoked a very strong reaction from the Australian Jewish leadership.
Saul Symonds wrote from Sydney:
While we appreciate the financial position throughout the world
with regard to relief, we can see no reasonable excuse for your
action in permitting us to go ahead and apply for thousands of
people to come to Australia, and now refusing us the necessary
funds to carry out the obligations entered into. We have entered
into commitments far in excess of what we can finance, and are now
told that the Joint can only give the limited support as set out in
your letter. (94)
Symonds stated that without a higher level of JDC support, the
Sydney Jewish community would have to close its DP immigration program.
Leo Fink, president of AJW&RS in Melbourne, was less strong in his
letter, but he also objected to the decision. In the end, the JDC
leadership agreed to increase funding for Australia for 1951 to ensure
that the Australian Immigration Project continued. (95) Further requests
were made in 1952, due to the fact that the Australian economy in the
195os fluctuated sharply and when the employment situation deteriorated,
as it did in 195z, the newcomers were the first to lose their jobs.
Again, Jordan was very critical of the Australians, stating that:
"as in the past, they are probably asking for double the amount
[needed for the number of immigrants] they are willing to accept."
He urged that the JDC should only provide the minimum assistance needed
and should also check with HIAS. (96)
As a result of these various visits and the subsequent grants given
by the JDC and HIAS, the Jewish community in Melbourne established a
total of eleven hostels, while the communities in Sydney and Brisbane
established five and one, respectively. The Bialystoker landsmanshaft in
Melbourne, which was formed with the aim of extending relief to
landslayt in Europe and to assist them in immigrating to Melbourne,
established the first Jewish hostel in Australia. (97) In 1945 there
were about one hundred families in Melbourne who had originated in
Bialystok and its surrounding district in Poland and had settled in
Melbourne in the late 1920s and 1930s. Key Jewish community leaders,
such as Leo Fink, whose parents and three brothers had settled in
Melbourne in the late 1920s, came from Bialystok. The Fink family
established the United Woollen Mills, providing employment for many of
the Bialystoker Jews. In December 1945, The Bialystoker landsmanshaft
created a company called Shelter and Aid, Proprietary Limited, and
purchased a property for 12,000 [pounds sterling] ($24,000) for this
first Jewish immigrant hostel. In Melbourne, over 1000 survivors were
housed in 1950-1951, and 1400 in the period 1951-1952. (98) After that,
as declining immigration lessened the need for hostels, a few of the
buildings were either sold or used for other communal purposes.
By mid-1953 most Jewish DPs had been resettled in either Israel or
the diaspora and only one DP camp, Fohrenwald in Germany, remained in
existence. There were a number of DPs there who wished to emigrate to
Australia. (99) Sir Henry d'Avigdor Goldsmid and Victor Girmounsky,
the leaders of the Jewish Colonial Association (ICA), approached the JDC
to see if they would agree to cooperate in providing funding to resettle
these refugees in Australia. They offered to ask ICA board member Leslie
Prince, who was going to Australia at the end of the year for personal
reasons, to investigate the situation. The possibility of cooperation
with the ICA was first raised by the JDC as early as 1947, but this was
the first time the two groups worked together on Australian matters.
(100) Prince's report was much more positive than Glassgold's
regarding the Australian Jewish leadership, stressing that he was
"impressed with the earnestness of their work and the zeal
displayed in trying to create a new home for the many thousands of
migrants who have arrived on their shores." (101)
Therefore, in mid-1954 the JDC and the ICA agreed to each provide
half of a 20,000 [pounds sterling] grant in order to help facilitate
further immigration to Australia. (102) According to special conditions
set down by the organizations, these funds were to be used exclusively
to provide loans of around 750 [pounds sterling] to assist immigrants to
set up small businesses. (103)
Over the entire period from 1946 to 1954, the American
organizations experienced problems arising from their distance from the
Australian community that they were aiding, their inability to directly
supervise the project, and the different financial and currency systems
in use in the two countries. One difficulty was ensuring that the
Australian Jewish organizations provided proper accounting reports of
their expenditures. This was an ongoing problem due to the limited
number of staff working for Jewish welfare agencies in both Melbourne
and Sydney, but the JDC continued to insist that the Australians follow
correct accounting procedures and supply the regular financial
statistics as requested. (104)
A more serious challenge was that of converting the agreed upon
funds from American dollars into pounds sterling, since monetary
conversion was difficult in the immediate postwar years. The JDC
leadership believed that because of the nature of their work, they had
to strictly observe the regulations regarding currency exchange, but at
the same time they sought legal ways of expediting this matter. (105)
They even turned to South African Jewry, which was raising funds for the
JDC but was not involved in resettling survivors because of the
exclusionary policies of the South African government. (106) They found
that the most efficient way to overcome this problem was to work through
several American film companies that donated funds to the JDC. Because
of their Australian business connections, these companies, including
firms such as Samuel Goldwyn Productions, RKO Radio Pictures, Ltd., and
Sol Lesser Productions, had the ability to pay their pledges in
Australian pounds, funds that could then be used to pay commitments made
to the Australian Jewish community. (107) During his visit in 1956, JDC
assistant director Herbert Katzki met with representatives of the
Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) and later wrote requesting the use
of CBA's facilities by the JDC in order "to secure maximum
local currencies for our programmes." (108) Thus, every effort was
made by the JDC in regard to providing funds for Australia.
Intercommunal and Interagency Rivalries
Despite the strong desire to assist Holocaust survivors who wished
to leave Europe in doing so as quickly as possible, the Australian
Immigration Project was hindered by organizational rivalries, those that
existed between the Sydney and Melbourne Jewish communities as well as
those between the JDC, the REC, and HIAS. These intercommunal rivalries
affected the project at a number of different levels in both Australia
and the United States and reflected the different approaches that had
historically been taken by communities and organizations dominated by
central European Jews and their descendants on the one hand and eastern
European Jews and their descendants on the other.
In Australia, a Jewish organizational structure that reflected both
interethnic and intercity rivalries complicated relations with the
American groups. Early on, there had been some efforts to bridge the
divides that threatened to paralyze Australian Jewish welfare efforts.
An umbrella organization, the Executive Council of Australia Jewry
(ECAJ), had been formed in 1944, and when the war ended it identified
the facilitation of Jewish survivor immigration as one of its major
responsibilities. While the ECAJ negotiated with the Australian
government and formulated policy for lobbying the government, however,
the routine work of immigrant reception was undertaken by the local
Jewish welfare societies, particularly in the larger centers of
Melbourne and Sydney.
From the start, tensions emerged between the two main Jewish
agencies involved in refugee assistance in Australia--Melbourne's
AJW&RS and Sydney's AJWS. Because of Melbourne Jewry's
more assertive approach to aiding European immigrants and the
willingness of its members to sponsor their landslayt through various
landsmanshaftn, 60 percent of all survivors who entered Australia
settled in Melbourne. As a result, Melbourne's Jewish leaders
constantly stressed that they were shouldering a greater burden than
Sydney, and they were not prepared to be controlled by the latter. For
its part, the Sydney leadership saw itself as the more established and
more acculturated voice of Australian Jewry and resisted allowing the
Melbourne leaders to challenge their dominance. As the conflict between
the two communities escalated, the two local camps did not hesitate to
involve the American Jewish leadership in these conflicts. Jordan
described the problem as follows:
Brand and Symonds wish to perpetuate control by establishing a
federal body superseding all local welfare agencies. They will want
to allocate responsibility for absorbing immigrants on a quota
basis. They dare not yet ask for control of finances. But they are
opposed by Melbourne; it is primarily a fight between British
non-Zionist Jews (Sydney) versus Polish Zionist Jews (Melbourne).
The Sydney group wishes to control the influx and the integration
to make sure that the newcomers don't create difficulties. (109)
The "federal body" Jordan refers to was the Federation of
Australian Jewish Welfare Societies (FAJWS), which did ultimately come
into existence with the following objects:
(a) To act as representatives with the Commonwealth Government in
conjunction with the Executive Council of Australian Jewry for the
Jewish Communities in Australia in regard to Jewish immigration into
Australia
(b) To ensure that Jewish immigration into Australia will be
orderly and systematic and that migrants will be distributed equitably
between the various states.
(c) To co-ordinate the activities of all constituent bodies
(d) To disseminate information on matters of migration etc to state
bodies.
(e) To enter into guarantees for the admission of Jewish Displaced
Persons and/or immigrants into Australia. (110)
However, the FAJWS only worked on a cooperative basis in terms of
overall policy and Melbourne continued to act independently, especially
in regard to finances. Despite strenuous efforts made by the JDC to
persuade the two communities to cooperate, in the end the American
organizations agreed to fund the FAJWS (responsible for Brisbane, Perth,
and Adelaide) and Melbourne separately. (111) All communication relating
to Jewish immigrants going to Melbourne was sent directly to the
Melbourne office as this prevented unnecessary delay in dealing with
issues. Each of the JDC emissaries commented on the differences between
the two communities. Thus, Glassgold wrote to Leavitt in 1951: "In
their own ways they are doing a good job: Melbourne energetic but a
little chaotic; Sydney meticulous, precise, slow-moving and somewhat
apathetic." (112)
The intercity rivalry between the major Jewish communities in
Sydney and Melbourne was further complicated by tensions between the
American welfare societies, particularly between JDC and HIAS. The major
player in terms of the Australian Immigration Project was the JDC, which
extended its brief to assist all refugees from Nazi persecution and also
to provide relief and rehabilitation after the war. (113) The JDC worked
closely in conjunction with Charles Liebman and the REC, until the REC
merged with the JDC in 1953. Liebman was a strong supporter of
Australian Jewry and on a number of occasions when the JDC leadership
was critical of the community for not making what they considered a
sufficient effort, he sprang to its defense. (114)
On the other hand, the relationship between JDC and HIAS was marked
by ongoing tensions. Like the Sydney-Melbourne rivalry, these
interagency tensions reflected the different histories and approaches of
the two organizations and their leaders. HIAS, which was led by eastern
European immigrants, was much less concerned with diplomatic niceties
and more willing to challenge official government policies. In this
regard, it had much in common with the postwar Melbourne Jewish
leadership, including individuals such as Leo Fink, president of the
AJW&RS. In contrast, the JDC scrupulously followed government
protocol and sought more formal, diplomatic contacts with government
agencies. The JDC approach was more in keeping with the style of the
conservative, Anglo-Jewish Sydney leadership. Mirroring what occurred on
the local level in Australia, these differences in national origin and
culture led to ongoing clashes between the two American organizations.
Problems with HIAS particularly flared up in regard to the SS Johan
de Witt, the only survivor ship to have the 25 percent Jewish quota
fully waived by the Australian government in 1947. The JDC claimed that
spaces reserved for its own clients aboard the Johan de Witt had been
taken away by refugees whose passage had been organized by HIAS. HIAS in
turn, made similar accusations against the JDC. (115) The JDC
representative aboard the steamship was also highly critical of
HIAS's failure to provide adequate support for its clients on the
boat. "It is no secret for anybody here that everything done by
HIAS was wrong," he wrote. "I think it is the most unreliable
and irresponsible outfit amongst Jewish organizations to help displaced
persons." (116)
In July 1947, Lewis Neikrug, the HIAS director in Paris, became
impatient with the 25 percent quota that was then still in effect. As a
result, he announced that the organization would charter a ship just for
Jews, regardless of Australian policy. Great concern was expressed by
the JDC at this announcement. (117) Edward M. M. Warburg, the JDC
president, wrote to HIAS president Samuel A. Telsey, stating: "In
view of the very serious situation that might possibly result from such
a step, on the basis of informal discussion which our representative had
with the Australian delegate to the IRO, it seemed so important to us
that I felt that I ought to write to you directly and ask you to give
this your personal attention." (118) Telsey replied, assuring
Warburg that HIAS would not do anything in contravention of Australian
government policy, but the damage had already been done. When
immigration minister Calwell was in Paris in July 1947, he did not meet
with Neikrug, and in his meetings with the JDC in both Paris and New
York, he was highly critical of HIAS. When he met with Irwin Rosen in
Paris in July 1947, Calwell stated that HIAS's publicity releases
were counterproductive. (119) "HIAS has muddied the waters in its
strenuous attempts to outdo us," Rosen later reported to Jordan,
"particularly in relation to Australia." (120) In a private,
handwritten letter of September 1947, Jordan wrote to Leavitt in New
York that "Calwell can't say the word HIAS without stuttering.
He was impressed with you, and he likes Rosen," but
"swears that he will have nothing to do with 'these
people'." (121) The relationship between HIAS and the
Australian government did improve somewhat following the Australian
visit of Dr. Henry Shoskes, HIAS representative and American Jewish
activist of Polish origin, in 1949. (122) Whatever the successes or
failures of each organization in Australia, however, in the final
analysis, the inability of the two organizations to better work together
clearly worked against the overall effectiveness of the Australian
Immigration Project. One sign of this may have been the inability of
either HIAS or the JDC to establish a more permanent presence in
Australia, despite the fact that at various points both organizations
had expressed an interest in doing so. (123)
A Successful Cooperative Endeavor
This Australian postwar story is an important case study,
illustrating how American Jewry became involved with Jewish diaspora
communities across the world after 1945. In Australia, as in other parts
of the English-speaking world, Jews were viewed as
"undesirable" migrants by both the government and the voting
public so that public money was not to be expended on them. As a result,
financial assistance from the American Jewish organizations was needed.
Since Australian Jewry was too small a community to undertake the whole
burden of reception and integration of the survivors on its own, a
cooperative endeavor emerged between the two communities, with most
productive results. Supported by the Americans, the Jewish welfare
societies in the various Australian states played an active role in the
absorption of the postwar Jewish immigrants. This entailed an enormous
amount of effort but, on the whole, the societies did succeed in their
aims. As Komlos commented in 1949, "the heart of the matter ... is
that the 4000 Jews who come to Australia this year are finding exactly
what they seek and what we want them to have: a welcome, a job, a home
and a future." (124) In this way the AJW&RS in Melbourne and
the AJWS in Sydney became the pivotal organizations in the development
of postwar Australian Jewry, but the role that American Jewry played was
central to their work. Melbourne Jewry ended up with the highest
proportion of Holocaust survivors on a prorata basis of any place
outside Israel. Yet, without the ongoing administrative and financial
support of the three key American welfare organizations, this
immigration program to Australia could not have taken place.
* The authors are grateful for the assistance of Sherry Hyman,
Shelley Helfand, and Misha Mitsel of the JDCA Archives in New York; Dr.
Sara Kadosh of the JDCA Archives in Jerusalem; and the archivists of the
YIVO Institute in New York. This project was funded by an ARC/Linkage
Grant.
(1.) For this characterization of the Australian Jewish community,
see Suzanne D. Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish
Settlement in Australia, 2nd edition (New York: Hohnes & Meier,
2001).
(2.) These population figures come from the official government
census conducted every five years. There has been significant debate
about the census figures among various demographers of Australian Jewry,
largely because of the significant under-enumeration, which most
scholars estimate at 20 percent. On this controversy, see Rutland, Edge
of the Diaspora, 287.
(3.) Suzanne Rutland, "Postwar Anti-Jewish Refugee Hysteria: A
Case of Racial or Religious Bigotry?" Journal of Australian Studies
77 (2003): 69-79.
(4.) The phrase comes from Emery Komlos to Charles Liebman, Sep.
16, 1949, in JDC AR 45/54, file 96, American Joint Distribution
Committee Archives, New York (hereafter cited as JDCA-NY).
(5.) Oscar Handlin, A Continuing Task: The American Joint
Distribution Committee, 1914-1964 (New York: Random House, 1964), 9.
(6.) Leonard Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the
Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 202.
(7.) REC annual report for 1949, JDC AR 45/54, file 1894, JDCA-NY.
See also, Joseph C. Hyman, "25 Years of American Aid to Jews
Overseas: A Record of the J.D.C.," American Jewish Yearbook 41
(1939-1940): 174.
(8.) On these activities, see Rose Klepfisz and Emil Lang,
Annotated Catalogue of the Archives of the American Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee, 1933-1944 (New York: American Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee, 1985); and the REC annual reports for 1946,
1948, and 1949 in JDC AR 45/54, file 1894, JDCA-NY.
(9.) On the history of HIAS, see Mark Wischnitzer, Visas to
Freedom: The History of HIAS (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1956);
and Ronald Sanders, Shores of Refuge: A Hundred Years of Jewish
Emigration (New York: Holt, 1988).
(10.) Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust, 202.
(11.) Ibid., 201-202. The task of absorbing survivors in the United
States itself was carried out by the United Service for New Americans
(USNA), which was created in 1946 following the merger of the National
Refugee Service and the National Service to the Foreign Born of the
National Council of Jewish Women. Its activities of purchasing hostels,
finding employment, providing relief and loans, and assisting the
integration of survivors into American society were paralleled by
efforts of the welfare societies in Australia. In the years immediately
following the war, USNA became the second largest voluntary social
service agency in the United States, after the American Red Cross, and
in the period from 1946 to 1951 it had a total budget of $34 million,
which was spent primarily on relief services in the United States. See
Ibid., 203.
(12.) See Barbara Stern Burstin, After the Holocaust: The Migration
of Polish Jews and Christians to Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 66.
(13.) Yehuda Bauer, Out of the Ashes: the Impact of American Jews
on Post-Holocaust European Jewry (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989), 77, 199, 2.56; Wischnitzer, Visas to Freedom, 226-28; Sanders,
Shores of Refuge.
(14.) "Notes on meeting with Charles Liebman," May 16,
1947, in JDC AR 45/54, file 97, JDCA NY. The stress placed on secrecy
was ongoing. For example, see Charles Malamuth to JDC, Sep. 20, 1947;
and Charles Liebman to Moses Leavitt, Oct. 14, 1947, stating: "In
my opinion, as well as that of the Australians, it would be disastrous
if anything got on the wires of Australia that American Jews were
encouraging Jewish immigration to Australia." Both letters are in
AR JDC 45/54, file 97, JDCA-NY.
(15.) Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None is Too Many: Canada and
the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948 (Toronto: Random House, 1983), 284.
(16.) Ibid., 281.
(17.) For an overview of U.S. policy toward Jewish refugees
following World War II, see Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of
the Holocaust. On England's approach to Jewish refugee resettlement
both in the United Kingdom and in Palestine, see Louise London,
Whitehall and the Jews: British Immigration Policy, and the Holocaust
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Arieh J. Kochavi,
Post-Holocaust Politics: Britain, the United States, and Jewish
Refugees, 1945-1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2001). On Australian policy, see Suzanne D. Rutland, "Postwar
Anti-Jewish Refugee Hysteria"; Rutland, "Australian Responses
to Jewish Refugee Migration Before and After World War II,"
Australian Journal of Politics and History 31 (1985): 29-48; and Michael
Blakeney, Australia and the Jewish Refugees, 1933-1948 (Sydney: Croom
Helm, 1985).
(18.) Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the
Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 307-308.
(19.) Beth B. Cohen, Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar
America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 13.
(20.) Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust,
163-64.
(21.) As quoted in ibid., 137-38.
(22.) Ibid., 139-40.
(23.) Ibid., 166.
(24.) Ibid., 166-67.
(25.) Cohen, Case Closed, 15.
(26.) Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust, 167.
(27.) Ibid., 181.
(28.) Ibid., 217-53.
(29.) Cohen, Case Closed, 9; William B. Helmreich Against All Odds:
Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 14.
(30.) See, for example, Abella and Troper, None is Too Many; and
Marrus, The Unwanted.
(31.) On the immigration of DPs to Palestine/Israel, see Eugene J.
Cohen, Rescue (New York: Riverside Publishing Company, 1991); Tad Szulc,
The Secret Alliance: The Extraordinary Story of the Rescue of the Jews
Since World War II (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991); and
Abram L. Sachar, The Redemption of the Unwanted: From the Liberation of
the Death Camps to the Founding of Israel (New York: St. Martin's/
Marek, 1983).
(32.) This subcommittee consisted of J. Horgan and A. R. Peters of
the Department of Interior and W. D. Forsyth of the Department of
External Affairs. See the memo on "Postwar Migration," Sep.
21, 1944, CRS A373, item 7786/89, National Archives of Australia,
Canberra (hereafter cited as NAA), 10, 16.
(33.) Ibid., 9.
(34.) Ibid., 7.
(35.) Gisela Kaplan, "From 'Enemy Alien' to Assisted
Immigrant: Australian Public Opinion of Germans and Germany ill the
Australian Print Media, 1945-1956," in German-Australian Cultural
Relations Since 1945, ed. Mandfred Jurgensen (Bern: Peter Lang, 1995),
89.
(36.) Address by Harold Holt, minister of immigration, Jan. 22,
1951, Citizenship Convention, box E13, Executive Council of Australian
Jewry (ECAJ) correspondence files, 1951-1952, Archive of Australian
Judaica (hereafter cited as AAJ), Fisher Library, University of Sydney.
(37.) Dan L. Adler and Ronald Taft, "Some Psychological
Aspects of Immigrant Assimilation," in New Faces: Immigration and
Family Life in Australia, ed. Alan Stoller (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1966),
77; and Jan Schmortte, "Attitudes Towards German Immigration in
South Australia in the Post-Second World War Period," Australian
Journal of Politics and History 51 (Dec. 2005): 542.
(38.) Ibid.
(39.) Kaplan, "From 'Enemy Alien' to Assisted
Migrant," 88.
(40.) Suzanne D. Rutland, "Are you Jewish?: Postwar Jewish
Immigration to Australia, 1945-1954," Australian Journal of Jewish
Studies (1991): 35-58.
(41.) Suzanne D. Rutland, "Subtle Exclusions: Postwar Jewish
Emigration to Australia and the Impact of the IRO Scheme," Journal
of Holocaust Education l o (Summer 2001): 50-66.
(42.) Berlin Instruction No. 42, "Recruitment of Jews,"
Jun. 2, 1949, as quoted in Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora, 407.
(43.) Charles Price, "Postwar Migration: Demographic
Background," in Stoller, New Faces, 20-21. The notion that these
discrepancies in funding reflected a racialist ideology is supported by
Kaplan, "From 'Enemy Alien' to Assisted Migrant,"
93.
(44.) Dr. Max Joseph to HIAS-ICA Emigration Association, Paris,
Feb. 1, 1946, file 436, France IV, HIAS-HICEM Archives (hereafter cited
as HIAS-HICEM), YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Center for Jewish
History, New York.
(45.) Kaplan, "From 'Enemy Alien' to Assisted
Migrant," 92.
(46.) United Jewish Overseas Relief Fund (UJORF) to HIAS, Paris,
Jan. 31, 1946, file 436, France IV, HIAS-HICEM.
(47.) Gertrude van Tinj, "Australia," report on UJORF,
n.d., JDC AR 45/54, file 90, JDCA-NY. Australia did not begin using
dollars until 1966; in this article amounts given in pounds refer to
Australian currency and those given in dollars refer to United States
currency.
(48.) See Suzanne D. Rutland, The Jews in Australia (Melbourne:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 153-54.
(49.) On the lack of cooperation between the two communities, see
Walter Brand to Moses Leavitt, Jan. 3, 1947, AR JDC 45/54, file 97,
JDCA-NY.
(50.) Ibid. See also cable from Melbourne to Moses Leavitt, JDC,
Jan. 18, 1946, AR JDC 45/54, file 97; and cable from I. Feiglin to
Europe, Jan. 17, 1946, JDC AR 45/54, file 105, JDCA-NY.
(51.) Charles Jordan to Saul Symonds, Dec. 1, 1948, JDC AR 45/54,
file 96, JDCA-NY.
(52.) HIAS to A. Junowicz, UJORF Melbourne, Dec. 10, 1946, file
436, France IV, HIAS-HICEM.
(53.) I. Feiglin to JDC, Jan. 17, 1946, JDC AR 45/54, file 105,
JDCA-NY.
(54.) For examples of accounting letters, see the one signed by
Simon Shargo and Moses Beckelman, Feb. 9, 1950, JDC AR 45/54, file 93;
and the letters in JDC AR 45/54, file 92; all in JDCA-NY. These letters
illustrate the ongoing administrative and financial support that the JDC
provided to facilitate transportation to Australia both by boat and
later plane.
(55.) Paris was the headquarters of HIAS's European
activities. Lewis Neikrug succeeded Dr. James Bernstein as head of the
office early in 1946. Bernstein had served in that position for
twenty-one years. See Wischnitzer, Visas to Freedom, 241.
(56.) Agreement between HIAS of Paris and Larssons Shipping
Company, Ltd., of Stockholm, May 14, 1947, file 440, France IV,
HIAS-HICEM.
(57.) Arne Larsson, Stockholm, to Lewis Neikrug, HIAS of Paris,
Jul. 15, 1947, file 440, France IV, HIAS-HICEM. For Larsson's
account of the episode, see his autobiography, Ships and Friendships
(Leicester, England: Matador, 2004), 113-15.
(58.) E J. Blakeney, memo on the SS Tidewater, Oct. 3, 1947,
correspondence files, CRS Aio67, items 1C/46/31/1/14.A1067 and
IC/46/31/1/14, Department of External Affairs, NAA.
(59.) Cable, Lewis Neikrug to Leo Fink, Sep. 26, 1947, file 437,
France IV, HIAS-HICEM.
(60.) Ibid.; and Saul Symonds to Leo Fink, Oct. 8, 1947, Box ES,
ECAJ correspondence files, AAJ.
(61.) "AJDC--Emigration Office--Genoa: Australian
Departures," Feb. 20, 1950, 4, JDC AR 45/54, file 95, JDCA-NY.
(62.) Walter Brand, general secretary, Australia Jewish Welfare
Society, Sydney, to Henry L. Levy, AJDC, Paris, May 17, 1951, JDC AR
45/54, file 92, JDCA-NY.
(63.) See Frederick Grubel, chief accountant of JDC, New York, to
United Jewish Overseas Relief Fund, Melbourne, Jun. 1, 1948, JDC AR
45/54, file 93, JDCA-NY.
(64.) Herbert Katzki to JDC, New York, Apr. 10, 1951, JDC AR 45/54,
file 95, JDCA-NY; and H. Levy to Walter Brand, May 7, 1951, box 322B,
file 26, Geneva II, JDC Archives at Hebrew University, Givat Ram campus,
Jerusalem (hereafter cited as JDCA-GR).
(65.) Frederick Grubel to United Jewish Overseas Relief Fund,
Melbourne, Jun. 1, 1948, JDC AR 45154, file 93, JDCA-NY.
(66.) Robert Pilpel to JDC Paris, Sep. 5, 1951, AR JDC 45/54, file
90, JDCA-NY.
(67.) W. L. Brand to Robert Pilpel, Sep. 25, 1951, JDC 45/54, file
92., JDCA-NY.
(68.) See, for example, correspondence between Walter Brand, Robert
Pilpel, and Amelia Igel, Jul. 11, Aug. 11, and Aug. 22, 1947, JDC AR
45/54, file 98, JDCA-NY; and the letters on the Australian
Children's Project in box 322B, files 25 and 26, Geneva II,
JDCA-GR.
(69.) The OSE (sometimes OZE, an acronym for the Russian words
meaning "Jewish Health Society") was founded in St. Petersburg
in 1912 by a group of young physicians aiming to reduce Jewish mortality
rates. After the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the founders moved to
bordering nations, such as Poland and Lithuania, and reconstituted the
OSE there, later creating branches in other European countries. In 1922,
the various national OSE groups formed an international federation--the
Union-OSE--headquartered in Berlin, where Albert Einstein served as the
first president. During and after World War 11, the Union-OSE was very
active in rescuing Jewish children. See "OZE or OSE," s.v.,
Encyclopedia Judaica, 2d edition; Bauer, My Brother's Keeper, 34.
(70.) Suzanne D. Rutland, Take Heart Again: The Story of a
Fellowship of Jewish Doctors (Sydney: Fellowship of Jewish Doctors,
1983), 30-33. For a full list of the children sent on the ship, see
"Australia, Immigration of Children 1946-1949," Dec. 2, 1947,
JDC AR 45/54, file 98, JDCA-NY.
(71.) Harry Lesnie to Charles Liebman, Feb. 9, 1949, JDC AR 45/54,
file 96, JDCA-NY.
(72.) Walter Brand to Charles Liebman, Jun. 24, 1948, JDC AR 45/54,
file 96, JDCA-NY.
(73.) Saul Symonds to Emery Komlos, Apr. 5, 1949, correspondence
files, Australian Jewish Welfare Society, Sydney (hereafter cited as
AJWSA-S).
(74.) Memo, "AJWS--Guarantees of Accommodation," Oct. 28,
1948, CRS A434, item 50/3/4844, Department of Immigration, NAA. See also
A. Junowicz to Leo Fink, Jun. 23, 1940; and Maurice Heller to Leo Fink,
Jun. 27, 1950, both in Australian Jewish Welfare and Relief Society
Archives, Melbourne (hereafter cited as AJW&RSA-M). Heller pointed
out that "this action was only taken when I brought up this matter
while in Sydney."
(75.) Daniel Soyer has studied the phenomenon of landsmanshaftn in
the United States. See his Jewish Immigrant Associations and American
Identity in New York, 1880-1939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997). The goals and structure of landsmanshaftn in Australia
were very similar to what Soyer reports for New York.
(76.) "Annual Report of Board of Management, AJW&RS,
Melbourne, 1950-1951," AJW&RSA-M.
(77.) Walter Brand to Charles Liebman, Jun. 24, 1948, JDC AR 45/54,
file 96, JDCA-NY.
(78.) Saul Symonds to Moses A. Leavitt, Aug. 19, 1947, AR JDC
45/54, file 97, JDCA-NY.
(79.) "Some Aspects of Future Jewish Migration to
Australia," notes dictated by Paul Cullen of Sydney, Australia, in
New York, Sep. 25, 1947; Confidential report, meeting with immigration
minister Arthur Calwell and immigration officers, written from
Singapore, Sep. 23, 1947, both in AR JDC 45/54, file 97, JDCA-NY.
(80.) Waiter Brand to Charles Jordan, May 12, 1948; and Robert
Pilpel to Moses Leavitt and Moses Beckelman, Dec. l, 1949, both in JDC
AR 45/54, file 96, JDCA-NY.
(81.) Walter Brand to Moses Leavitt, Feb. 22, 1950, JDC AR 45/54,
file 95, JDCA-NY.
(82.) Charles Jordan, Shanghai, to Irwin Rosen, Paris, May 12,
1947, AR JDC 45/54, file 97, JDCA-NY.
(83.) E Grubel to Robert Pilpel, New York, Aug. 21, 1950, JDC AR
45/54, file 93, JDCA-NY.
(84.) Moses Leavitt to Saul Symonds, Jul. 16, 1947, AR JDC 45/54,
file 97, JDCA-NY.
(85.) Gertrude van Tinj, report to Charles Jordan, Jan. 17, 1947,
AR JDC 45/54, file 90, JDCA-NY. Both Mutual Farms and Mutual Enterprises
were established in 1939 under the auspices of the AJWS in Sydney,
following its appeal to the JDC for funding support.
(86.) Charles Jordan to Moses Leavirt, Aug. 31, 1947, AR JDC 45/54,
file 90, JDCA-NY.
(87.) Moses Leavitt to Charles Jordan, Mar. 2, 1948, AR JDC 45/54,
file 90, JDCA-NY.
(88.) Walter Brand to Charles Liebman, Dec. 17, 1948, box 322B,
file 28, Geneva II, JDCA-GR.
(89.) Emery Komlos to Charles Liebman, Sep. 16, 1949, JDC AR 45/54,
file 96, JDCA-NY.
(90.) General minutes of administration committee, Jail. 17, 1950,
6-7, JDC AR 45/54, file 95, JDCA-NY.
(91.) Ibid., May 15, 1951.
(92.) Adolph C. Glassgold, "Report on Australian Operations:
Confidential," Jun. 14, 1951, AR 45/54, reel 8, file 90, JDCA-GR.
(93.) General minutes of administration committee, Aug. 14, 1951,
JDC AR 45/54, file 95, JDCA-NY.
(94.) Saul Symonds to Robert Pilpel, Aug. 13, 1951, box 322B, file
28, Geneva II, JDCA-GR.
(95.) Leo Fink to Robert Pilpel, Aug. 10, 1951, box 322b, file 28,
Geneva II, JDCA-GR.
(96.) Charles Jordan to Moses Leavitt, Nov. 24, 1952, JDC AR 45/54,
file 92, JDCA-NY.
(97.) A. Junowicz to Leo Fink, Jun. 23, 1950; and Maurice Heller,
acting president, AJW&RS, Melbourne, to Leo Fink, Jun. 27, 1950,
AJW&RSA-M.
(98.) AJW&RS annual reports, 1949-1952, AJW&RSA-M.
(99.) "Memorandum by Mr. Prince on the preliminary visit which
he paid to the continent prior to his departure to Australia," Dec.
3, 1953, JDC AR 45/54, file 95, JDCA-NY.
(100.) "Minutes of the Administrative Committee of the Joint
Distribution Committee," Sep. 9, 1947, 3, AR JDC 45/54, file 90,
JDCA-NY; letters in box 322B, file 31, Geneva II, JDCA-GR.
(101.) See Prince's report, Dec. 1953-Jan. 1954, 23, JDC AR
45/54, file 91, JDCA-NY.
(102.) Victor Girmounsky of ICA and Moses Beckelman of JDC to
FAJWS, June 24, 1954, AR JDC 45/54, file 90, JDCA-NY.
(103.) Paul A. Cullen, "AJWS, Suggested basis for the handling
of any moneys that may be received from I.C.A. as a result of Mr. L.
Prince's visit to Australia," box 322B, file 31, Geneva II,
JDCA-GR.
(104.) JDC, New York, to AJW&RS, Melbourne, Mar. 30, 1950, JDC
AR 45/54, file 93, JDCA-NY.
(105.) Philip Skorneck to UJORF, Sydney, Sep. 16, 1948, JDC AR
45/54, file 105, JDCA-NY.
(106.) See, for example, cable to Johannesburg, Oct. 7, 1947, JDC
AR 45/54, file 105; and Dorothy Speiser to Simon Shargo, Dec. 11, 1951,
JDC AR 45/54, file 92, JDCA-NY.
(107.) For more details, see JDC AR 45/54, file 92, JDCA-NY. For a
list of ways to transfer funds into Australian dollars, using both
companies and individuals, see JDC AR 45/54, file lOZ, JDCA-NY.
(108.) Katzki was in Australia as an investigator for Conference of
Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, known as the Claims Conference,
for which JDC personnel such as Katzki provided administrative support.
Katzki to Mr. Tate, Division of Monetary Control, Commonwealth Bank of
Australia, Sydney, Aug. 27, 1956, box 322B, file 24, Geneva II, JDCA-GR.
(109.) Charles Jordan to Moses Leavitt, Aug. 31, 1947, 1, AR JDC
45/54, file 90, JDCA-NY.
(110.) Maurice Hiller and J. Waks, Melbourne, to Moses Leavitt,
Mar. 31, 1950, 2, JDC AR 45/54, file 95, JDCA-NY.
(111.) There is extensive correspondence about this matter in the
JDC files. See, for example, Moses Leavitt to Leo Fink, Feb. 21, 1950;
Maurice Hiller and J. Waks' reply, Mar. 31, 1950; and letters of
May 10, 22, 23 and 25 between Hiller in Melbourne, Saul Symonds in
Sydney, and Moses Leavitt and Robert Pilpel in New York; all in JDC AR
45/54, file 95, JDCA-NY. See also Melvin S. Goldstein to Charles Jordan,
May 15, 1950; and Pilpel to Symonds, Jun. 16, 1950; both in box 322B,
file 26, Geneva II, JDCA-GR.
(112.) Adolph C. Glassgold to Moses A. Leavitt, executive
vice-chairman, JDC, New York, Jun. ix, 1951, AR 45/54, reel 8, file 90,
JDCA-GR.
(113.) Confidential report, meeting with immigration minister
Calwell and immigration officers, Singapore, Sep. 23, r947, AR JDC
45/54, file 97, JDCA-NY
(114.) See, for example, Moses Leavitt to Charles Jordan, Aug. 1,
1947, 1, AR JDC 45/54, file 97, JDCA-NY.
(115.) Irwin Rosen to Dr. Joseph J. Schwartz, Feb. 18, 1947, AR JDC
45/54, file 97, JDCA-NY. HIAS played a key role in the chartering of the
SS Johan de Witt and in sponsoring 400 of its passengers. See
Wischnitzer, Visas to Freedom, 227.
(116.) A. L. Ringer, AJDC representative on board the SS Johan de
Witt, to Irwin Rosen, Feb. 28, 1947, 1 AR JDC 45/54, file 97, JDCA-NY.
Ringer expressed similar sentiments in his letter of Mar. 31, 1947, JDC
AR 45/54, file 96, JDCA-NY.
(117.) Joel H. Fisher, "Possible Difficulties with HIAS in
connection with Immigration of Refugees into Australia," memo to
Moses Beckelman, JDC vice-chairman, Jul. 23, 1947, AR JDC 45/54, file
97, JDCA-NY.
(118.) Edward M. M. Warburg to Samuel A. Telsey, Aug. 13, 1947, AR
JDC 45/54, file 97, JDCA-NY.
(119.) Irwin Rosen, "Meeting with Mr. Arthur Calwell,
Australian Minister for Immigration, 16 July 1947," 1, AR JDC
45/54, file 97, JDCA-NY.
(120.) Irwin Rosen to Charles Jordan, Jul. 18, 3947, 1, AR JDC
45/54, file 97, JDCA-NY.
(121.) Charles Jordan to Moses Leavitt, Sep. 18, 1947, AR JDC
45/54, file 97, JDCA-NY.
(122.) Walter Brand to Charles Jordan, Feb. 3, 1949, JDC AR 45/54,
file 96, JDCA-NY.
(123.) Lewis Neikrug, HIAS of Paris, to A. Junowicz, UJORF,
Melbourne, Jan. 2, 1947, file 437, France IV, HIAS-HICEM. Charles Jordan
of the JDC was the most persistent advocate of creating a more permanent
institutional presence in Australia. See, for example, Jordan to Moses
Leavitt, Aug. 31, 1947, AR JDC 45/54, file 90, JDCA-NY.
(124.) Emery Komlos, "Survey of Jewish Migration and
Settlement in Australia," Oct. 26, 1949, file 438, France IV,
HIAS-HICEM.