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

tangible humanitarian actions. 61 Ruppin noted that it was clearly obvious that the gates
would be closed to all but a few refugees. However, to the press Ruppin described the
Evian Conference as the “first silver lining in the dark clouds” that hovered over the
Jewish world and he anticipated that the IGCR would play a “big role in the emigration
problem.” 62 Bentwich described the Conference’s final report as “flat, like the mineral
water of the place” and the exclusion of Palestine from consideration was “stultifying.” 63
The American Hebrew concluded that the “hopes” and aspirations of the real and
potential forced émigrés was “rapidly sinking” due to the failure of the Conference to
achieve meaningful results. 64
Professor Arye Tartakower, historian and sociologist and a senior member of the
World Jewish Congress, attended the Evian Conference as the representative of a Polish
emigration society and described the results as a “dismal failure.” 65
The “insulting
episode of the civilized world’s reaction” to German “criminal atrocities” would forever
be a stain on the collective memory of mankind. 66 Historian Joseph Tenenbaum
attributed the “gloomy failure” of the refugee conference to the plain reality that “no
country wanted to open its gates to Jews.” He observed that the “flow of oratory and the
hustling and bustling at special committee meetings did not obscure the paucity of
61 Nahum Goldmann, Memoirs (Jerusalem: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), 158.
62 Arthur Ruppin, Chapters of My Life in the Building of the Land and the Nation, 1920-1942 (Tel Aviv:
Am Oved, 1968), 301.
63 Bentwich, My Seventy Seven Years, 148.
64 Contemporary Jewish Record, vol. 1 (July 1938), 22 cited in Gurlock, America, American Jews, 229.
65 Interview with Dr. Tartakower, Department for Oral Documentation, Institute of Contemporary
Jewry, Hebrew University, Tape No. 1820 in Beit-Zvi, Post-Uganda Zionism, 139.
66 AryeTartakower, Jewish Settlement in the Diaspora (Tel Aviv: M. Newman, 1958), 268. Ibid., 139.
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