After the fall of France in June 1940, the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), an American organization that had sprung from the Jewish labor movement in New York in 1934, organized the rescue of hundreds of European socialist and labor leaders and their families. France had been the country of exile for many Italian antifascists since the 1920s as well as for thousands of German and Austrian anti-Nazis after 1933. With the beginning of the war, what had been a precarious refuge now became a deathtrap. Since September 1939, many German activists were interned in detention camps in extremely unsanitary conditions. Also, with the Armistice convention, which the Pétain government signed on June 22 1940, Vichy authorities were to “surrender on demand” all anti-Nazi persons requested by the Gestapo. Similarly, Italian antifascists could be remanded to the Mussolini political police.¹

Among the leaders rescued by the JLC between September 1940 and July 1941 were such important figures as Friedrich Adler, Secretary General of the Labor and Socialist International (LSI); Julius Deutsch, head of the workers' rebellion in Vienna in 1934; Raphael Abramovitch, head of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party in exile (Menshevik); George Stolz, Assistant Secretary of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU); Friedrich Stampfer, former editor of the German Vorwärtz in Berlin; Alberto Cianca, editor of Giustizia e Libertà in Paris; and Randolfo Pacciardi, who had been commander of the Garibaldi Brigade in Spain. Simultaneously, the JLC led a rescue operation for those Polish Bundists, its closest political friends, who had found refuge in Lithuania since September 1939. After the Soviet invasion of that country in June 1940, Polish refugees found themselves in a similar trap as their comrades in France, over eighty of them were saved by the JLC's intervention. Finally, by July 1941, according to the most complete document established by the JLC, from France and Lithuania, 544 labor and socialist leaders and intellectuals had reached the United States (the number includes family dependents who were saved with them).²

The JLC's activities extended well beyond these rescue operations.³

The rescue of these socialist refugees is a prism through which the scope of the JLC's international activities in the 1930s and in the early years of the war in Europe can be explored. The purpose of this paper is to establish the ideological reasons as well as the institutional and personal connections by which the JLC was able to reach out from New York to so many European leaders and activists and why it did so.⁴

On the American side, the JLC's achievements raise a number of historical questions. Its ability to obtain visas for hundreds of European political refugees is an extraordinary feat in itself given the extremely narrow constraints of US immigration policy in the 1930s and 1940s.⁵

From the European and international perspective, the rescue episode belongs to the last and neglected chapter of the history of the Labor and Socialist International (LSI) and its union corollary, the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU).⁶

Finally, the description of the mechanisms of rescue and of the persons involved on both sides of the Atlantic links the JLC's history to that of other organizations operating on behalf of persecuted or stranded persons in Europe, and to Varian Fry's Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) in particular. While many books have been written on the hospitality afforded by American philanthropic and cultural institutions to artists, scientists, and intellectuals admitted “above the quotas” during the 1930s, as well as on Varian Fry's spirited intervention on their behalf in France,⁷

If we explore the dramatic events of 1940–41, when hundreds were saved from certain arrest by the Gestapo, we must also include in the picture the whole genealogy of decisions, contacts, and interventions helping refugees since the advent of the Nazi regime in 1933. Had not the JLC already contributed to these leaders' survival in exile, it would not have been able to reach them in their French or Lithuanian last retreats. Yet the apex of the refugee crisis, 1939–1941, before the US entered the war, resulted from Third-Reich attacks on Poland and Western Europe combined with Soviet attacks on Poland in the context of the Nazi-Communist pact of nonaggression from 1939 to 41. The political and geographic boundaries of this pact reinforced the JLC's determination to save its political friends from destruction by all totalitarian regimes (Nazi or communist).

The Origin and Foundation of the Jewish Labor Committee

Founded in New York City in February 1934, the Jewish Labor Committee gathered the main organizations of the American noncommunist Jewish left: the garment trades unions; the fraternal order of the Workmen's Circle; and a number of small Jewish socialist political organizations. In leadership and political outlook the JLC may be considered a resurgence of the Bundist movement in the United States, a resurgence provoked by the rise of the Nazi dictatorship. The Bund (General Jewish Workers' Union of Russia, Lithuania and Poland) was founded in 1897 in the Russian Empire. It was both a socialist revolutionary party and a general union devoted to the defense of Jewish workers and the protection of Yiddish culture in the Pale. As articulated by one of its most prominent leaders, Vladimir Medem, Bundism dialectically combined the values of proletarian internationalism with the defense of an oppressed culture and people. It inscribed universal socialism in a messianic but secular Jewish culture.¹⁰

Sidney Hillman and David Dubinsky had also been Bundists in their youth in the Russian Empire; like other militants they had been imprisoned, confined, and forced underground. They came to the United States in 1907 and 1911, respectively, and within a few years occupied leading positions in their unions. Hillman founded the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) in 1914 and presided over its destiny for over three decades; and Dubinsky was elected to the presidency of the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) in 1932.¹²

Following the decline of the Socialist Party of America after the First World War and the split created in its ranks by the creation of the Communist Party of the United States, Bundist socialism mainly came to be expressed in the unions and in the associative world of the Workmen's Circle. The political organizations that adhered to the JLC, the Jewish Socialist Verband and the Labor Zionists, were numerically small. With the advent of the New Deal the Jewish electorate became more supportive of the Democratic Party. In 1936 most JLC leaders participated in the creation of the American Labor Party (ALP), whose mission was to rally the working-class electorate to support Franklin D. Roosevelt for a second term. Vladeck was elected on the ALP ticket to the New York City Council in 1937. Uniting the main institutions of Jewish labor—the ILGWU, the ACWA and the Workmen's Circle—the JLC claimed 400,000 members in 1934 and half-a-million one year later. It commanded a large network of financial and moral support within the American working class.

The Jewish socialists' opposition to communism differed from classic American antiradicalism in that it resulted primarily from their initial confrontation with the Bolsheviks in Russia, who had first opposed and then absorbed or physically liquidated the Bundists and their party after the Revolution of 1917. Some of the JLC leaders, like Isaiah Minkoff, had escaped this second period of terror. This original hostility was augmented in the US in the 1920s by policies of ILGWU and ACWA leaders who steered their unions clear of any communist takeover, fearful of the Comintern-dictated policy of boring from within. By the early 1930s, weakened by these fratricidal wars which had left pro- and anticommunist factions in the unions, the leaders of the garment unions harbored no illusions concerning communism.¹³

Because of their political history and ethnic origin, JLC members were close to the Polish Bund. A direct heir to the original Bund, this party preserved this socialist current in the interwar political life of Poland. The Polish Bund became affiliated with the Labor and Socialist International (LSI) in 1930. Its members, as well as Bundists in the diaspora, and therefore JLC leaders, were in a position to meet the leaders of the European socialist parties and the heads of the main confederations of labor assembled in the IFTU, whose political choices were parallel to those of the LSI.¹⁵

With the rise of Hitler to power in 1933, and the dual persecution launched by the Nazi regime against Jewish people and all segments of the German labor movement, Vladeck immediately recognized the similar mechanisms of oppression that had been used against workers and Jews in the Russian Empire. “Jews have been a true barometer of the labor movement,” he declared at the 1934 AFL convention, where he presented the JLC's mission. “Whenever and wherever a government begins to persecute the Jews, it inevitably follows by persecuting the workers. Whatever the name of the country and whatever the location, the quality and the liberty, or the lack of them, enjoyed by Jews is likewise true of Labor.”¹⁶

The JLC's constitution reflected these broad international and domestic goals. The new organization's purpose was to “give aid to Jewish and non-Jewish labor institutions overseas; to assist the democratic labor movement in Europe; provide succor to victims of oppression and persecution; and to combat anti-Semitism and racial and religious intolerance abroad and in the United States.”¹⁷

JLC-AFL relations

Ideologically and functionally independent from the organized American labor movement, the JLC was however linked to it by the union members who were its common rank and file and its main constituent organizations. From its foundation to the early 1940s JLC relations with the AFL were more effective and significant in the national and international context of the anti-Nazi struggle than were relations with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Yet both Dubinsky and Hillman were part of the original Committee for Industrial Organization, which they helped form in 1935, and consistently favored the principle of industrial unionism. The ACWA, which had been affiliated to the AFL only since 1934, had no qualms about joining the CIO when unions supporting the latter were expelled from the AFL in 1936. The ILGWU, however, which favored labor unity, remained independent from both federations until 1940 when it finally reentered the old Federation. These splits did not prevent the JLC from cooperating with the AFL in its fight against Nazism and fascism. The CIO in its initial years, on the other hand, was engulfed in titanic struggles against giant American corporations, which claimed most of its energy.

A comparison between the ILGWU and the ACWA in their relation to the JLC is a case in point to illustrate the JLC's bifocal union support. In fact with the former union closer to (or in) the AFL and the latter in the CIO, the JLC had a foot in each camp. Certainly, Dubinsky was more involved in its work and leadership than Sidney Hillman ever was, but these unions' rank and file fully and equally responded to JLC drives for funds and support. In each union nationally prominent labor leaders were equally involved, such as Luigi Antonini on the ILGWU side and Augusto Bellanca with the ACWA when relations with Italian antifascists were at stake. And if not Hillman, it was Joseph Schlossberg, the ACWA secretary-treasurer, who represented the Amalgamated in the JLC executive board. Adolph Held, formerly the chairman of the Amalgamated Bank, was another ACWA executive to preside over the JLC's destiny after Vladeck's death in 1938. Although present at the JLC's founding, for several reasons Hillman did not remain one of its active leaders. Having had an experience of economic cooperation with the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, he was less intellectually opposed to communism than Dubinsky. Perhaps also was he less active in the preservation of Yiddish and Jewish culture than most JLC leaders, especially Schlossberg. Involved in the National Industrial Recovery Administration, and later in the National Defense Advisory Commission, Hillman exerted maximum support of Roosevelt's national domestic and international strategies, which during the Grand Alliance required the cohesion of labor ranks on the home front.¹⁹

In 1933, the AFL took a firm stand against Nazism, anti-Semitism, and the destruction of the German labor movement. At the Federation's convention in October of that year, the delegates adopted a decision to enforce a boycott of German-made goods and services. AFL President William Green unequivocally affirmed that “When those who are bound to us by the bonds of fraternity are persecuted or thrown in prison, when labor organizations are destroyed, I cannot conceive of an American labor movement remaining silent.” On the subject of anti-Semitism, he stated that “the test of citizenship [ . . . ] must not be whether you are a Gentile or a Jew, it ought to be what you are as a man.”²⁰

It was the JLC's belief that an alliance of labor and organized Jewish forces was necessary to combat Nazi terror. When Vladeck presented the JLC's mission at the 1934 AFL convention, he asked for the cooperation of organized American workers in the struggle against Nazism. The AFL Labor Chest in fact prolonged the fund that had been initiated earlier and was actually run by the JLC.²³

In July 1940, when the JLC executives submitted to the State Department the list of European labor leaders for whom they demanded emergency visas, the letter was written on AFL stationery and William Green was one of the four signers. In State Department parlance, the list of European political refugees to be rescued, which the JLC had established and coordinated, was referred to as the “Labor list,” the “AFL list,” or even the “Dubinsky list.” Such politically neutral terms were probably expedient to obtain the necessary visas for political activists who were much more to the left than AFL leaders ever could be.²⁵

The Weaving of Transatlantic Ties

In their 1933 resolutions, one of the first actions recommended by the IFTU and LSI, and which the JLC put into practice, was the relief and support of European labor and political refugees from Nazi and fascist regimes. Because of the realization of this first goal and increasing ILGWU participation in international labor organizations, American labor now became an active participant in these circles.

The first German labor leader to reach the United States was Martin Plettl, the President of the German Federation of Clothing Workers, who reached New York at the end of October 1933. Arrested in Berlin like fifty other German leaders during the fatal week of May 2, 1933, he had managed to escape to Amsterdam. His connection to the American world of labor was through the International Confederation of Clothing Workers, one of the IFTU Trade secretariats, to which the ILGWU had loosely maintained its affiliation through the 1920s without attending its conventions. The committee which organized Martin Plettl's coming to the US was a prefiguration of the JLC. Composed of David Dubinsky, Joseph Schlossberg, B.C. Vladeck, and Joseph Baskin of the Workmen's Circle, it sent Plettl on a tour of American cities, from November 1933 to the end of February 1934, to acquaint labor audiences with the German tragedy. The Fund for Labor and Socialist German Refugees created then was soon replaced by the JLC fund and by the AFL's Labor Chest.²⁶

It was on Martin Plettl's suggestion to Vladeck that Walter Citrine, President of the IFTU and General Secretary of the British Trades Union Congress (TUC), was invited to the AFL's October 1934 convention in San Francisco.²⁷

Similarly, Giuseppe Modigliani, a former socialist representative of Bologna in the Italian parliament, was invited by Luigi Antonini, president of the Italian Local 89 of the ILGWU. His presence helped inform Italian-American communities of the realities of fascism and deflect their frequent pro-Mussolini sympathies. Modigliani, who like most Italian antifascists was exiled in France, gave a long cycle of talks to Italian-American communities between December 1934 and March 1935.²⁹

The personal contacts thus established in the United States and in Europe brought about a rapprochement of American labor organizations with the political and trade-union internationals. The ILGWU participated more actively to the International Federation of Clothing Workers and attended its conventions. Dubinsky, appointed by William Green as AFL representative to the International Labor Organization (ILO), of which the US had recently become a member, was in Geneva in April 1935. The following year, Dubinsky came to the International Clothing Workers' Federation's convention in London in 1936. There he met Citrine again, along with other international representatives.³¹

Finally, from the summer of 1936 the Civil War in Spain was another cause for the international cooperation of democratic forces. It caused the AFL to renew its affiliation to the IFTU in 1937, a move called by Citrine since 1934. The AFL's commitment to the anti-Nazi struggle since 1933, the creation of the Labor Chest, and the central role played by the ILGWU in these transatlantic contacts eased the AFL's reaffiliation to the IFTU.³²

The JLC's special protégés

Among the refugees that the JLC collectively supported, some were closer to its founders' political or ethnic origin. Dissidents from the German Social Democratic party as well as Polish Bundists were some of those.

JLC leaders had been involved in the support of socialist exiles and underground movements since the early 1930s. Vladeck himself, ideologically close to Austrian socialism, travelled to Europe in 1935 and 1936.³⁴ In Prague, where German and Austrian socialist leaders had established headquarters (before the Anschsluss forced them to a second exile in Paris), he offered help to Friedrich Adler, Julius Deutsch, and Friedrich Stampfer, among others. But Vladeck was also int

Whereas the AFL was sensitive to the slanderous anticommunist campaign against Karl Frank/Paul Hagen and financed the more conservative German Labor Delegation, the JLC, while initially only giving support to Neu Beginnen, eventually supported both groups. During the 1940–41 rescue operations in France JLC leaders were careful to remain aloof of the inner divisions of German socialism by offering a helping hand to all persons designated either by SPD leaders or by Paul Hagen and the American Friends of German Freedom.

The JLC leaders' support of their original political friends in Poland had been constant since the mid 1930s. They were particularly sensitive to the plight of Jewish people discriminated against and impoverished by the Polish variant of Nazism under the Rydz-Smigly government which aimed at the emigration of a majority of the 3.5 million Jews. Polish Bundists could only adopt a narrow path between their right-wing and communist opponents and welcomed the help of their American comrades.³⁶ Dubins

When Poland was invaded by the German and the Soviet armies in September 1939, the plight of both Jews and socialists took an even more tragic turn. Many Bundists sought refuge in Lithuania. In response, the JLC defined its policy of political emigration. Knowing that any large-scale humanitarian gesture would be doomed in the US Congress which continued to oppose any relaxation of the immigration laws, they sought to obtain emergency visas for political leaders who had been able to escape to Lithuania or to the West like Arthur Szmul Zygielbojm, a former representative of Warsaw in the Polish Bund who took refuge in England. The difference between immigration and political emigration was one of numbers. The JLC knew that any request from the State Department had to be exceptional, motivated by political justification and supported by practical affidavits and means of support. The invasion of Lithuania by Soviet armies in June 1940 again made this request absolutely urgent.³⁹

The Rescue Operations

In June 1940, when millions of Belgian and French citizens were moved south by the German invasion, the JLC leaders were immediately conscious of the impending fate of those German, Austrian, Italian, and Polish refugees, as well as Russian Mensheviks who, in exile in France, were also escaping the approaching army. Because they had been in constant contact with the leaders of these social-democratic movements, mainstream or dissident, JLC executives were in a situation to act quickly on the exiles' behalf. They immediately resorted to the project of political refuge they had first planned for Polish Jewish leaders whose trajectory to Lithuania they had followed and whose rescue they simultaneously attempted.

“For the leaders of the labor movement now living in Lithuania and in France, the situation has become more tragic from day to day. They are actually in a death trap,” the JLC executive director, Isaiah Minkoff, wrote to Dubinsky on June 26, 1940. A few days later, on July 2, 1940, a delegation composed of William Green, David Dubinsky, Isaiah Minkoff, who was to mastermind the rescue operation, and Alexander Kahn, Vladeck's successor as General Manager of the Jewish Daily Forward, met in a conference with State Secretary Hull. They handed him a letter demanding “temporary haven” in The United States for these refugees:

The plea pointed out the similarity of the fates in all totalitarian regimes, Nazi, fascist, or communist. The next day Isaiah Minkoff met Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long and submitted to him a first list of approximately 400 names.⁴⁰

The realization of rescue operations was arduous for the JLC organizers and not without risks for its European beneficiaries. It had to overcome administrative difficulties in the US State and Justice Departments and in American embassies and consulates in France and Spain as well as in Lisbon, the last port of embarkation for the United States for those coming from France. It had to circumvent police controls and versatile administrative regulations concerning border crossings in France and Spain. For most of these refugees, the JLC provided the necessary affidavits, money, and transatlantic tickets to be obtained in Lisbon, but obtaining passports and finally authorizations to leave the French territory was extremely difficult and often led to operating with forged documents, false identities, and clandestine crossing of the Spanish border.⁴¹

Administratively speaking, the State Department had agreed to an exceptional course and at first did not object to the AFL/JLC list. The granting of temporary visitors' visas was a procedure that bypassed ordinary immigration quota provisions. The procedure in fact preceded the course favored by the Presidential Advisory Committee on Political Refugees (PACPR), the council which advised President Roosevelt on visas to be granted to outstanding European personalities. In a memorandum written on July 26, 1940, the PACPR decided to serve as a conduit between private groups and the Federal authorities. But the “AFL list,” as it was referred to, having been submitted earlier, did not have to be approved by the PACPR. Even in its third and final form of late August 1940, it was directly administered by State and Justice Department officials. Yet from September 1940, the JLC's action was hindered by disputes between the PACPR and the State Department's visa division and the latter's more exacting scrutiny of each case. By October 1940, Assistant State Secretary Breckinridge Long had decided that all lists be closed except for a few exceptions in “imminent danger.”⁴²

To overcome difficulties in France the JLC contributed to sending a delegate to Marseille, Frank Bohn. Officially known as the representative of the AFL, his mission had been defined by the German Labor Delegation and by a group of Italian antifascist refugees in the United States who around Professor Lionello Venturi formed the Italian Emergency Committee. In Marseille, Bohn contacted the consulate for the issuance of visas, provided money for the persons on the AFL/JLC list, and encouraged them to organize their departure. He had reached Marseille on August 2, a few days before Varian Fry, the agent of the New York-based Emergency Rescue Committee engaged in a comparable mission. Fry was entrusted with the fate of many artists and intellectuals on the PACPR lists, but also with German and Austrian socialists known to the JLC. Fry and Bohn cooperated in Marseille through August and September1940 and Fry served as a local contact for the JLC after Bohn was called back to the United States in October when the “AFL list” was closed.⁴³

Meanwhile, in New York, the JLC had to finalize the list of the persons it was attempting to save; the names had to be approved by the State Department, which would then cable the consulates in Marseille, and in Kaunas, Lithuania, for the granting of visas. The drafting of these lists relied on the ability of each political and national group of refugees to locate its comrades and provide new names when the original persons mentioned were not found or could not leave. Exiles from these groups who had already emigrated to the United States sent names to the JLC while, from the other end, in Marseille or Toulouse, the most prominent figures among them also cabled names to be added to the lists and asked for money, affidavits, and intervention on their behalf.

Finally, the lists reflected the galaxy of international contacts that the JLC had maintained through the 1930s. They reflected the political choices it had made in its previous anti-Nazi and antifascist activities. Urged by the continuing demands that came from France or the United States, the JLC had to rely on its long-term political friends for these choices. By the end of August 1940, the JLC had requested visas for 468 families, or 1380 persons, each visa being valid for immediate relatives. 108 of these families, counted as Polish-Jewish by the JLC, were in Lithuania, while 352 were in France. Among the latter, 149 were designated as Russian-Jewish, 140 as German-Austrian, 56 as Italian and 7 as Hungarian.⁴⁴

The first groups of comrades to be saved were those most directly connected to the Polish Bund: Bundists themselves and Left Poale Zionists or intellectuals, journalists, and leaders of the Jewish school system in Poland. Some of those who had escaped to Lithuania were able to reach Siberia and Japan. A first group of eighteen refugees launched on this extraordinary route reached Seattle on October 29 1940. By July 1941, eighty-five of these families had arrived on the west coast of the United States. Noach Portnoy, the president of the Central Committee of the Polish Bund, was among them. They gradually arrived in Seattle or San Francisco on Japanese ships until June 1941.⁴⁵

In France other groups were also quickly located by the JLC. The Russians, called the “Rafael Abramovitch group,” were social democrats (mostly Mensheviks), many of them Jews who had been close to the Bund in the Russian Empire, and well-known to their American friends. Abramovitch received the sum of $5000 from the JLC in August 1940 to finance his comrades' passage to America. They had temporarily been relocated near Toulouse, Montauban, Agen, or Castres, and were the first to be evacuated. Abramovitch, with his wife, two daughters, and six of his political friends, reached New York on the Excalibur on September 6 1940; Nicolai Avksentiev, on September 12 on the Nea Hellas; and Theodor Dan arrived on the Nyassa on Dec. 3, 1940.⁴⁶

Heading the list of German socialists stranded in Marseille, Rudolf Breitscheid and Rudolf Hilferding were the most prominent, but also the most unfortunate.⁴⁸

As a consequence of its settlement of the dispute about Neu Beginnen, the JLC had insured that members of the latter group as well as those from other dissident socialist groups would be included in the German and Austrian lists. For the dissident groups, at least nine Neu Beginnen members, six Sozialistische Arbeiter Partei, and two International Sozialistische Kampfbund, the JLC's enterprise was seconded by the Emergency Rescue Committee. Paul Hagen, a friend of Varian Fry, had contributed to the foundation of the Emergency Rescue Committee. The escape from France of those socialists to the left of the SPD was clearly the result of the combined efforts of the JLC and the Emergency Rescue Committee. On the other hand, the SPD leaders were more explicitly AFL protégés; hence Varian Fry's terse description of the division of labor established between himself and Frank Bohn: Bohn was to take care of the “old socialists,” SPD and Italian Socialist Party executives, while Fry was in charge of the “young” ones. Behind the generation gap were deeper SPD/ leftist group differences. For all, however, rescue would not have been possible without the JLC's persistent intervention in Washington.⁵⁰

Giuseppe Modigliani, in Marseille, had called attention to the many members of the Italian Socialist Party and the Italian labor movement exiled in the South. In the United States, Antonini and Dubinsky also intervened on their behalf. Giustizia e Libertà antifascists, however, were listed by one of the founders of the movement, Emilio Lussu, a former member of the Italian parliament, who was in Marseille through the summer of 1940 and the following winter, while Professor Lionello Venturi was also working on their behalf from the United States. Modigliani was the dispensator of the Italian Fund organized by Dubinsky and Antonini on behalf of the Italian friends in France.⁵¹

A shadow of the Labor and Socialist International in New York⁵³

The LSI itself was a defunct organization. The last meeting of its executive committee was held on April 3, 1940.

By the end of December 1940, the JLC estimated it had rescued some 308 persons. It had spent $138,499 on the operation. Proud of this achievement, the JLC executive committee decided to celebrate the arrival of the refugees in the United States. A grand conference was organized on January 17, 1941 at Carnegie Hall. It gathered some 3000 participants: refugees themselves and members of the organizations that had favored their escape from Europe. Secretary Hull and Breckinridge Long were thanked for their cooperation. President Franklin D. Roosevelt cabled his “hearty greetings” and encouragement for “construc-tive action in the solution of the grave problems under consideration.” On the stage, together with AFL president William Green, JLC president Adolph Held, and ILGWU president David Dubinsky, were seated some of the most prominent and emblematic leaders of the JLC's political friends : LSI General Secretary Friedrich Adler, head of the Russian Social-Democratic Party Rafael Abramovitch, and President of the Central Commitee of the Polish Bund Noach Portnoy. In this unusual gathering, the only time in history when an AFL president chaired a meeting with the General Secretary of the Labor and Socialist International or the president of a socialist party, all present stressed the broad, “nonsectarian,” and international character of the JLC's rescue record. Friedrich Adler was happy to mention the reunion of Polish Bundists separated after Hitler's invasion of their country: “Comrade Zygielbojm came across the Atlantic ocean while our old and honored comrade Noach [Portnoy] came through Siberia, Japan, the Pacific Ocean, and the United States. The same is true of us Austrian Social Democrats: Julius Deutsch came across the Atlantic Ocean, while comrade Ansboek, a man until recently active in the Austrian underground movement, crossed the Pacific. [ . . . ] When it came to rescuing the victims of European totalitarianism,” Adler continued, “the JLC did not guide itself by the religion of the person nor by his race or nationality. Help was extended to all who had rendered service to the International Labor Movement.”⁵⁴

According to Isaiah Minkoff's estimate, by July 1941, 544 persons, including family members, had reached the United States. Two other lists were compiled indicating that 191 persons for whom visas had been obtained were still waiting in Lisbon, in Japan, in Shanghai, or were still in France. In 1941, and with even more extreme difficulties in 1942, the JLC continued to intervene for those named on the original lists. But as the situation worsened in Europe, more appeals came every day for its intervention. In a report to the JLC Executive Committee on April 16, 1941, Minkoff stated that the success of the operation had increased the JLC's reputation and popularity. “From all sides requests began to be addressed to us in regard to migration. We tried until now not to get involved into the migration matters. [ . . . ] But to us requests are coming the whole time about cases and questions of political immigration, about people who are just as important as those who were on our lists.” Minkoff advised that these requests be directed to organizations that regularly dealt in immigration matters (Emergency Rescue Committee, Italian Emergency Rescue Committee, International Relief Association, and others) and that exceptional demands should be sent to the attention of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Political Refugees. In a 1942 document, the JLC executives stated: “The JLC was successful in its efforts to rescue leaders of European labor and the outstanding modern Jewish labor scholars and men of letters from extermination at the hands of the totalitarian dictators. [ . . . ] At this writing, there are more than 800 leaders who have reached the shores of the United States. For about 200 more, havens of refuge were found in other parts of the Western hemisphere. All financial obligations attendant upon this act of rescue were assumed by the Jewish Labor Committee, which, to date, spent on this undertaking alone a sum amounting to approximately $300,000.”⁵⁵

Epilogue

The US entry into the war in December 1941 further reduced the possibilities of refuge. The JLC from this time devoted most of its activity to the support and relief of Jewish people in Poland and elsewhere.⁵⁶

An evaluation of the multiple and far-reaching consequences of the rescue operations would require the writing of another chapter. Their impact on the European side included the fact that so many lives had been saved in heroic circumstances and the support of underground labor movements in the countries at war.⁵⁷

On the American side, the JLC-led anti-Nazi struggle and rescue episode had brought the AFL into closer contact with European labor movements. With the US intervention in the war the AFL and the ILGWU confirmed and extended their international role,⁵⁸

The postwar era, however, when the AFL gave free rein to its anti-Soviet and anticommunist abhorrence, must not subsume and eclipse the origins of the anti-Nazi activities of the previous period. The international contacts established in the prewar context were made possible by the JLC's historical links with European social democracy. While excluding communists from their solidarity, JLC leaders hoped to preserve democratic-socialist values for the creation of a postwar socialist world. They simultaneously fought for the survival of Jewish and Yiddish culture. Their specific Bundist origin had remained the basis of their solidarity with victims of Nazism, Jewish or not, in the 1930s. Yet the complete destruction of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and the emergence of a bipolar world in the Cold-War era reinforced their opposition to all totalitarian regimes. In the process, the socialist stream of a noncommunist left which the JLC represented acclimated to the rigid American polarity of the Cold-War era. The right/left dichotomy squashed the independent socialist venue which the JLC had followed in the 1930s. Such monolithic conceptions even precluded the commemoration of the rescue events which for long fell into oblivion.⁶¹

But it would be anachronistic to view the JLC's achievements of international solidarity in the 1930s and early 1940s from the perspective of the later period. Of all American organizations, it had been the only one to foresee, all too accurately, that under Nazi rule the fates of Jews and of organized labor were related. The limits of the JLC's success were bounded by Nazi savagery on the one hand, and by the impossibility of obtaining any large-scale relaxation of the US immigration laws on the other. The success of the JLC's rescue operations must be measured against these forces. These operations reveal that neither the JLC executive officers nor the many rank-and-file workers who constituted its membership remained idle or indifferent to the plight of Jewish and non-Jewish people under Nazi or fascist rule.