Part XII

In December 1939, President Roosevelt appointed Myron C. Taylor as a special envoy to the Vatican. Taylor, a retired chairman of the board of U.S. Steel, a diplomat with narrow experience in emigration matters and a Quaker, had led an American delegation to the refugee conference in Evian-les-Bains, France, in July 1938. In that year, approximately 150,000 German Jews fled their homeland. On March 12, 1938 an additional 185,000 Jews came under Nazi rule, when the Nazis annexed Austria.

Jews were so traumatized by the swift measures enacted against them, they no longer had the time to “catch their breath,” leading to “a real hysteria,” according to Georg Landauer, director of the Central Bureau for the Settlement of German Jews in Palestine. Saul Friedlander quoted Landauer, who said that this panic was best conveyed by a Ludwigsburg Jewish woman who asserted “that if she didn’t have children, she would long ago commit suicide.”

According to historian Henry Feingold, when Taylor asked about liberalizing the American quota system, Samuel I. Rosen, a member of the president’s brain trust and a prominent member of the American Jewish community, said: “I do not believe it either desirable or practical to recommend any change in the quota provision of our immigration law.”

At the Evian Conference, the delegates insisted their countries were not financially in a position to expand immigration quotas. The failure to find a solution for the desperate Jews in search of refuge should not have come as a surprise. In 1936, Chaim Weizmann, leader of the Zionist movement, observed, “The world seems to be divided into two parts—those places where the Jews cannot live and those where they cannot enter.”

Though there had been a vigorous negative public response to Kristallnacht, Feingold attributed this to nothing more than a strong sympathy for the underdog. In 1938, 67.4 percent of Americans opposed changing the immigration law. This increased to 83 percent in 1939. In a radio address on November 25, Taylor assured the public there were no efforts to amend the immigration law.

The administration’s concern for Catholic refugees led Roosevelt to appoint Taylor as his special representative to Pope Pius XII, the first American representative to the Vatican since 1867. Feingold noted that to enlist the good will of the American people, Roosevelt believed the moral dimension of the refugee problem had to be emphasized. The Vatican was the agency that most personified human concern for the welfare of the refugees.

“The whole refugee problem,” Roosevelt believed, could be positioned “on a broad religious basis thereby making it possible to gain the kind of worldwide support that a mere Jewish Relief set-up would not evoke.” Until public opinion had changed, the president appeared certain that little could be accomplished.

In a letter of February 14, 1940 sent to Pope Pius II, Roosevelt wrote, “I am entrusting this special mission to Mr. Taylor who is a very old friend of mine, and in whom I repose the utmost confidence. His humanitarian efforts in behalf of those whom political disruption has rendered homeless are well known to Your Holiness. I shall be happy to feel that he may be the channel of communication for any views You and I may wish to exchange in the interest of concord among the peoples of the world.”

In addition Taylor’s appointment to the Vatican, on December 23, 1939, the President called on all faiths to cooperate in preparation for a just peace. Dr. Cyrus Adler, president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, was asked to serve as the official Jewish representative and spokesman for this peace commission.

The Jewish community enthusiastically hailed his announcement. Their strong support for the president’s peace initiative reflected their trust in the sincerity of his efforts. On December 31, 1939, The New York Times quoted Rabbi Israel Goldstein, who said: “When the President of the United States invokes the religious conscience of mankind to bring its influence to bear on the working out of a just and enduring peace, he speaks for the entire American people.”

Roosevelt’s letter “to the head of the Catholic Church, coupled with his invitation to representatives of the Protestants and Jews to consult about this crucial problem, has had the effect of making all Americans feel a renewed sense of inter-religious fellowship.”

On the same day, the Times quoted Rabbi Louis I. Newman of Congregation Rodeph Shalom in New York City: “President Roosevelt may be regarded as a new Moses speaking before the Pharaohs of today.” The Times quoted Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein of the West End Institutional Synagogue on December 25, 1939, who called President Roosevelt “the world’s hope for peace.”

An editorial in B’nai B’rith’s National Jewish Monthly in February 1940 observed, “History will note the era of hate and cruelty into which the President’s call came like some voice from another world.”

Samuel Margoshes, writing in Der Tog on December 29, 1939, remarked that although he saw little hope that peace could be achieved until after the defeat of Hitler, he regarded Roosevelt as “forward looking” and deeply concerned.

For American Jews, Roosevelt was the moral force in the world in 1939. His call to unite religious Catholic, Jewish and Protestant leaders for the sake of peace added to a number of activities he initiated, ostensibly directed at ameliorating the plight of the refugees, Feingold explains. At the conference of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees convened in Washington in October 1939, the president again demonstrated his “fundamental understanding of the magnitude of the refugee problem,” declared the Labor Zionist’s Jewish Frontier.

Even though he “studiously avoided any reference to …Palestine” in speech to the conference, observed The New Palestine, organ of the Zionist Organization of America, the president was the only speaker who referred to the plight of the refugees as basically a Jewish problem, according to the Congress Bulletin. Opinion magazine, under the auspices of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, commented that Roosevelt had the “statesman’s view of the problem, embracing both the short and long range of refugee needs.”

American Jewry could simply not fathom, Henry Feingold explained, that although Roosevelt had expressed sympathy for the refugees and “cast a statesman like eye on the future refugee problem, there seemed little that the administration was willing to do to relieve immediate distress.”

By Alex Grobman, PhD