Editorial Note: What the 1943 American Jewish Conference Really Said — and What Was Later Added
What you’re about to read is a primary source — The American Jewish Conference: First Session, 1943, edited and published by Alexander S. Kohanski in June 1944, while the last million Jews of Europe were still alive.
When the Conference was held (from late August to September 1943), the mass destruction of European Jewry was already well known. The Bermuda Conference had just collapsed, and the Bergson Group was filling the American press with headlines demanding rescue. Yet, as this record shows, the word “rescue” is nearly absent from the official agenda or speeches. It only appears after the Bergson campaigns — and even then, almost always in the context of Palestine as the sole destination.
Consider Hayim Greenberg, one of the leading intellectuals on the Interim Committee. His now-famous essay “Bankrupt!” (written barely two weeks after the Pittsburgh preparatory meeting of January 23–25, 1943) shows his frustration with Zionist priorities. Greenberg saw no organized plan for immediate rescue — only for the postwar future. His speech in the proceedings (pp. 302–304) confirms that rescue was, at best, a rhetorical afterthought. Thus, American Jewry was not asleep at the wheel (news of the Holocaust used to be reported in real time via JTA), and rescue was deliberately dropped. Actually, the word rescue had negative connotations to Zionist leaders in the 1930s and 40s.
Even more revealing are the invitation letters and preparatory memoranda reproduced on pp. 319 and 332–333, issued on January 6 and May 1943. They contain no reference whatsoever to rescue — only to “rehabilitation and settlement of refugees,” “Palestine,” and “postwar reconstruction.”
And yet, in Kohanski’s 1944 edition, one finds phrases such as “immediate rescue of Jews from Europe” inserted on pp. 15 and 411. These headings were not present in the 1943 transcripts. They were added after the fact, once the Bergson Group and others had forced “rescue” onto the political agenda. The editor, who claimed on pp. 5–6 to have made “no substantive changes,” in fact inserted these phrases to give the illusion that the Conference had been focused on saving lives all along.
In reality, the Conference debates — including Judge Joseph M. Proskauer’s remarks on pp. 168–169 — reveal deep anxiety that “maximal demands” (that is, pressing the U.S. government for more than Palestine) might alienate Washington. The leadership feared overreach far more than it feared passivity.
This subtle editorial gaslighting, performed less than a year after the events, transformed a historical record of hesitation into a story of humanitarian urgency. The truth, however, lies in the pages themselves: there was no rescue plan, no budget for rescue, and no moral reckoning until others forced it into the public sphere.
The astute reader might ask: why did Zionist leaders purposely avoid discussing rescue? The answer is simple: they were terrified if the Jews were rescued (in Europe or elsewhere other than Palestine), that would have rendered their Zionist project mute and useless. This explains why Chaim Weizmann didn't even bring up the subject of rescue when he met the leader of the free world, FDR, on June 12th, 1943. To prove how this subject is a taboo in Jewish communities, this issue was investigated by American Jewry in early 1983, and they were quickly NIXED. Actually, when you inspect this Conference's page on Wikipedia, you shall find one single reference to the word rescue, and it was written in the context of the Bergson Group! That by itself proves how big a taboo subject this was and still is.
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Note how the editor, Mr. Kohanski, inserted the words "immediate rescue," although the whole chapter did not address rescuing European Jewry. Honestly, we didn't find the word rescue in this entire chapter, and it seems that was inserted way after the fact (the earliest was either June, 1946 or April, 1945), after the
Bergson Group raised the rescue issue in the media:
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Note how the editor, Mr. Kohanski, inserted the words "immediate rescue," although the whole chapter did not address rescuing European Jewry. Honestly, we didn't find the word rescue in this entire chapter, and it seems that was inserted way after the fact (the earliest was April 1945), after the
Bergson Groupraised the rescue issue in the media:
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