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

The fiscal backers of the pledge were concerned not only about the number of the
refugees but also their class, background, age and national origin. Immigrants older than
forty five years were excluded as their prospects of overseas relocation were considered
limited. Following the Anschluss Schiff encouraged the Home Office to require visas for
German and Austrian refugees in order to control the quantity and quality of the Jewish
immigrants entering Britain. The visa was necessary, according to a delegation of the
British Jews Board of Deputies (of which Schiff was a member), because of the
difficulties entailed in removing a refugee once they had successfully landed in Britain.
Sir Samuel Hoare of the Home Office concurred and warned that a deluge of the
inappropriate type of migrant would pose a significant risk of inciting anti-Semitism
among the British natives and the creation of a domestic Jewish Question; a position in
which the Board of Deputies delegation stood in full agreement. 59
Dr. Nahum Goldmann, who attended the Evian Conference with Dr. Arthur
Ruppin, was a member of the unofficial Zionist delegation. Commenting in 1972 and a
year later in his memoirs he described the meeting as a “shame and scandal for the entire
progressive world.” 60
The Conference was a “wretched and tragicomic spectacle” and
from the outset it was clear that the democratic nations would fail to provide meaningful
and substantive aid to the refugees while substituting warm words of sympathy for
59 Vivian David Lipman, A History of the Jews in Britain Since 1858 (New York: Holmes & Meier,
1990), 196; Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1979), 82; Norman Bentwich, Wanderer between Two Worlds (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner:
1941), 175; PRO HO 213/42: Minutes of meeting, April 1, 1938, 3 cited in Geoffrey Alderman, Modern
British Jewry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 275-278.
61 Nahum Goldmann radio broadcast on Israeli Army Radio on January 16, 1972, “Friends Talk about
Arthur Ruppin” in Beit-Zvi, Post-Uganda Zionism, 139.
270