FDRLibrary | Jewish Refugee Children from France and the Establishment of the War Refugee Board (part 1) @FDRLibrary | Uploaded 3 years ago | Updated 3 hours ago
Video Updates from Dr. Abby Gondek, Morgenthau Scholar in Residence: Henry Morgenthau Jr. Holocaust Collections Project, FDR Presidential Library.

This is part 1 of Dr. Gondek's explanation of her online exhibit entitled "Jewish refugee children and the establishment of the War Refugee Board, 1943-1944, a path through the Morgenthau Diaries and the War Refugee Board Papers." In this video, she provides an overview of this exhibit which explores the conflicts between Treasury and State over issuing a license to the Joint Distribution Committee to operate in "enemy territory." The State Department used the conflict between the Joint and World Jewish Congress (WJC) to block, delay and prevent the effectiveness of the license to the Joint. Gondek describes the origin of the exhibit, which began as an EHRI (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure) conference presentation for an event hosted in Paris at the Memorial de la Shoah in September 2019. She then talks about a part of this larger exhibit entitled, "Jewish organizational conflict as fuel for State Department delays." She describes three key figures in this conflict: John Pehle (Treasury), William Riegelman (State) and Leland Harrison (minister to Switzerland) as well as three archival/primary source documents used for the beginning of the exhibit which illustrate the conflicts between Treasury and State and between these two Jewish organizations. One of the central areas of conflict was over where the children from France should be sent: Palestine or elsewhere. One of the central arguments she makes is that the issue of rescuing Jewish children from France as well as the conflicts between these Jewish organizations were central to the discussions in Treasury that led up to the establishment of the War Refugee Board in January 1944.