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

the American delegates to Evian during a June 27 meeting of the Council of Germany
Jewry held in London, that the United States wanted the meeting itself to set the agenda
and procedures. Ginsburg advised the Jewish Agency Executive in Jerusalem that the
conference would fail due to lack of adequate preparatory planning. Eliahu Dobkin, the
director of the Jewish Agency’s Immigration Department, addressed the Jewish Agency
Executive in Jerusalem and echoed Ginsburg’s sentiments. James G. McDonald, the head
of the newly appointed President’s Advisory Committee, was also ill-informed regarding
the structure and functions of the meeting and was uncertain about the results to be
expected from the Conference. 50
The United States had hoped to hold the conference in Geneva, Switzerland but
the Swiss, wary of offending Germany, loyal to the Geneva based League of Nations and
also conscious of its own restrictive immigration policies, declined. The Swiss also
feared that they would be called upon to host any permanent refugee committee created
by the Evian Conference. 51
The French government, under Premier Léon Blum and the
French Foreign Minister Joseph Paul Boncour, offered the “luxurious” Hotel Royal,
50 Adler-Rudel/Correspondence, 171, 240, Minutes of the Jewish Agency Executive meeting June 26,
1938, Adler-Rudel Diplomatische Politische Korrespondenz ll, 240 cited in Shabtai Beit-Zvi, Post-Uganda
Zionism in the Crisis of the Holocaust, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: AAARGH Publishing House, 2004), 142. Dobkin
(December 31, 1898-October 26, 1976) was a leading Zionist and signatory to the Israeli Declaration of
Independence. Adler-Rudel was born in Czernowitz, Austria-Hungary (June 23, 1894-November 15, 1975)
and worked as a social worker in Vienna and Berlin. He served as the executive secretary of the
Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden and on the executive board of the Zionistische Vereinigung fuer
Deutschland from 1933-36 when he immigrated to the United Kingdom and later resettled in Israel in 1949.
Fred Grubel, ed., Catalog of the Archival Collections Leo Baeck Institute (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1990),
2.
51 Michael Mashberg, “American Diplomacy and the Jewish Refugees, 1938-1939,” YIVO Annual of
Jewish Social Science 15 (1974), 346; “Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland—Second World
War “Switzerland and Refugees in the Nazi Era” (Bern: 1999), 41 available from
http://www.swissbankclaims.com/Documents/DOC_15_Bergier_Refugee.pdf; Internet; accessed June 19,
2010.
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