The Jewish Trail of Tears The Evian Conference of ... - Haruth.com

that would take a number of months. 69 This restrictive arrangement limited the number of
landing permits granted German and Austrian Jews to three hundred per month. Paul
Bartrop has argued that such restraint originated in an “anti-foreign and anti-Semitic bias
prevalent among some key personnel in the government departments.” 70 Blakeney, on the
other hand, claimed that opposition to Jewish immigration, primarily those from Central
and Eastern Europe, was not primarily driven by anti-Semitic sentiments but rather by
fears of its effect on unemployment, salaries, standards of living and working
conditions. 71
Australia did agree during December 1938 to accept 15,000 immigrants or
in the language of the day, “reffos” (refugees), over a period of three years but only 9,000
actually landed during 1933-1943. 72
Interestingly, some Australian Jewish leaders viewed their foreign coreligionists
with considerable narrow-mindededness and opposed the immigration of their
German and Austrian brethren. Sir Samuel Cohen, the president of the Australian Jewish
Welfare Society, stated during August 1938, that the thoughts of Australian Jews were
69 Samuel Pietsch, “Not ‘desirable’: Government Scapegoating of Jewish Refugees,” Jubilee Conference
of the Australasian Political Studies Association Australian National University, Canberra, October 2002, 2
available from http://arts.anu.edu.au/sss/apsa/Papers/pietsch.pdf; Internet; accessed October 3, 2010.
70 Paul Bartrop. Australia and the Holocaust, 1933-1945 (Kew, Victoria: Australian Scholarly
Publishing, 1994), 129-130, 245.
71 Blakeney, Australia and the Jewish Refugees, 63.
72 Blakeney, Australia and the Jewish Refugees, 147, 159; Caroline Moorehead, Human Cargo: A
Journey Among Refugees (NY: Picador, 2006), 117. Prejudice against Jews extended into the war years.
Facing fears of a German invasion of Palestine and Cyprus the British Government sought agreement with
the Australian Prime Minister to accept 5,500 British subjects who faced possible evacuation. In response,
the Department of the Prime Minister queried the number of Jews that would be included and the
percentage that spoke English. By September 1941 the Australian Government agreed to accept until the
end of the war 2,000 British evacuees from the Palestine Mandate provided they spoke English, were
family members of British police officers or other governmental officials (especially if of the female
gender) and were non-Jewish. Peter Y. Medding, ed., Values, Interests and Identity: Jews and Politics in a
Changing World Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 187.
180