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

The National Conference of Jews and Christians issued a declaration of
principles, co-signed by ninety-nine leading Jewish, Protestant and Catholic theologians,
predicting that Nazi policies would be “relentlessly furthered in Austria” and that all of
the religious faiths were obligated to unite in the defense of universal “human rights and
liberties.” 105 Dr. Cyrus Adler expressed in a statement, issued in the New York Journal
and American (among other Hearst papers), that only force could alter the ideological
path of Hitler as there were “no forum or bar to which decent world opinion can appeal
from the unconscionable assaults of Nazi Germany.” Adler called on American Jews to
“steel themselves” in order to provide aid to their beleaguered co-religionists. The
Executive Committee of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America passed
a resolution critical of the “extension to Austria of the [German policy of] inhuman
persecution of the Jews” which threatened “our Christian brethren in Austria, both
Catholic and Protestant, whose religious liberty is destroyed with the loss of their
political independence.” The Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress on
March 30 condemned the Anschluss and its resultant persecution of religious minorities,
Jew and non-Jew. 106
Herbert Feis, a Jewish economic advisor in the State Department and a supporter
of New Deal policies, called for American engagement in the refugee crisis and noted
105 The signers of this declaration included President Henry Sloane Coffin of the Union Theological
Seminary; Dr. Robert J. Cannon, President of Fordham University; Dr. Cyrus Adler, President of the
American Jewish Committee; Dr. Stephen S. Wise, President of the American Jewish Congress, and Dr.
Edgar de Witt Jones, President of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America.
106 Schneiderman, ed., American Jewish Year Book Review of the Year 5698, 94-96.
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