World Jewish Congress

The World Jewish Congress is an international federation of Jewish communities and organizations, founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in August 1936. According to its mission statement, the World Jewish Congress's main purpose is to act as "the diplomatic arm of the Jewish people". Membership in the WJC is open to all representative Jewish groups or communities, irrespective of the social, political or economic ideology of the community's host country. The World Jewish Congress headquarters are in New York City, and the organization maintains international offices in Brussels, Belgium; Jerusalem; Paris, France; Moscow, Russia; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Geneva, Switzerland. The WJC has special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council.

History

The World Jewish Congress was established in Geneva, Switzerland, in August 1936 in reaction to the rise of Nazism and the growing wave of European anti-Semitism. Since its founding, it has been a permanent body with offices around the world. The main aims of the organization were "to mobilize the Jewish people and the democratic forces against the Nazi onslaught", to "fight for equal political and economic rights everywhere, and particularly for the Jewish minorities in Central and Eastern Europe", to support the establishment of a "Jewish National Home in Palestine" and to create "a worldwide Jewish representative body based on the concept of the unity of the Jewish people, democratically organized and able to act on matters of common concern".

Precursor organizations (1917–1936)

The WJC's precursor organizations were the American Jewish Congress and the Comité des Délégations Juives. The latter was established in March 1919 to represent Jewish communities at the Paris Peace Conference, and advocated for Jewish minority rights in various countries, including the negotiation of rights for Jews in Turkey in the Treaty of Sèvres and special agreements with smaller eastern European states. Headed by Russian Zionist Leo Motzkin, the Comité des Délégations Juives was composed of delegations from Palestine, the United States, Canada, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, East Galicia, Romania, Transylvania, Bukovina, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece, and funded mainly by the World Zionist Organization.
However, the first impetus for the creation of the WJC came from the American Jewish Congress. In December 1917, the AJC adopted a resolution calling for the "convening of a World Jewish Congress", "as soon as peace is declared among the warring nations" in Europe. In 1923, Motzkin visited the United States and addressed the AJC Executive Committee, "pleading for a World Conference of Jews to discuss the conditions of Jews in various lands and to devise ways and means for effective protection of Jewish rights". Conferences co-organized by Motzkin and the AJC leaders Julian Mack and Stephen Wise took place in 1926 in London and in 1927 in Zurich, Switzerland. The latter was attended by 65 Jews from 13 countries, representing 43 Jewish organizations, though the main Jewish groups in Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, as well as the American Jewish Committee, declined the invitation to attend.
The First Preparatory World Jewish Conference was held in Geneva in August 1932. A preparatory committee was headed by Zionist Nahum Goldmann, who was one of the leading advocates of the establishment of an international Jewish representative body. Goldmann defined the purpose of the World Jewish Congress as follows:

It is to establish the permanent address of the Jewish people; amidst the fragmentation and atomization of Jewish life and of the Jewish community; it is to establish a real, legitimate, collective representation of Jewry which will be entitled to speak in the name of the 16 million Jews to the nations and governments of the world, as well as to the Jews themselves.

The conference approved plans to set up the new organization in 1934, with headquarters in New York and European offices in Berlin, Germany. In a manifesto, delegates called upon the Jewish people to unite as the only effective means of averting danger. The Jews, the declaration said, had to rely on their own power with the assistance of such enlightened sections of the world which had not yet been saturated with poisonous anti-Semitism. It added: "The World Jewish Congress does not aim at weakening any existing organizations, but rather to support and stimulate them." The new organization would be based on the "concept of the Jewish people as a national entity, and authorized and obligated to deal with all problems affecting Jewish life".
In the summer of 1933, following the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and his NSDAP in Germany, American Jewish Congress President Bernard Deutsch called on US Jewish organizations to support the establishment of a World Jewish Congress "to prove the sincerity of their stand" in favor of the embattled Jews of Germany.

Founding (1936)

After two more preparatory conferences in 1933 and 1934, the First Plenary Assembly, held in Geneva in August 1936, established the World Jewish Congress as a permanent and democratic organization. Elections for delegates to that assembly had to be according to democratic principles, namely secret, direct, and based on proportional representation. The 52 American delegates, for instance, were chosen at an Electoral Convention which met in Washington, DC, on 13/14 June 1936 and which was attended by 1,000 representatives from 99 communities in 32 US states.
The World Jewish Congress's expressed goal was Jewish unity and the strengthening of Jewish political influence to assure the survival of the Jewish people and promote the establishment of a Jewish state. 230 delegates representing 32 countries gathered for the first WJC assembly. Addressing a press conference in Geneva, Stephen S. Wise assailed German Jews for opposing the WJC. He said: "I must make clear that the congress is not a parliament nor an attempt at a parliament. It is nothing more than an assembly of representatives of those Jewries which choose to associate themselves in defense of Jewish rights. The congress will not be wholly representative until all Jews choose to be represented by it."
Although the delegates elected the US federal judge and erstwhile president of the American Jewish Congress Julian Mack as honorary president of the WJC, Wise was appointed as chairman of the WJC Executive and thus de facto leader of the congress. Nahum Goldmann was named chair of the Administrative Committee. The WJC Executive immediately drew up a declaration urging the British government not to halt immigration to Palestine which was presented to British diplomats in Bern, Switzerland.
The WJC chose Paris as its headquarters with a liaison office to the League of Nations in Geneva, first headed by the Swiss international lawyer and WJC Legal Advisor Paul Guggenheim and later by Gerhart Riegner, who initially served as Guggenheim's secretary.
In its fight against growing anti-Semitism in Europe, the WJC pursued a two-pronged approach: the political and legal sphere and organizing a boycott of products from Nazi Germany. Given the weakness of the League of Nations vis-à-vis Germany and the successful efforts by the Nazi regime to stave off an economic boycott, neither approach proved very effective.
Following the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms against Jews in Germany in which at least 91 Jews were killed and many synagogues and Jewish shops were destroyed, the WJC issued a statement: "Though the Congress deplores the fatal shooting of an official of the German Embassy in Paris by a young Polish Jew of seventeen, it is obliged to protest energetically against the violent attacks in the German press against the whole of Judaism because of this act and, especially, to protest against the reprisals taken against the German Jews after the crime."
With the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, the WJC moved to Geneva to facilitate communications with Jewish communities in Europe. In the summer of 1940, by which time most of Europe had fallen under Nazi occupation, the headquarters were moved to New York to share office space with the American Jewish Congress, and a special WJC office was set up in London. The British Section of the WJC was tasked with acting as the European representative of the organization.
Some of the personnel who worked in the WJC's European offices immigrated to the United States when the WJC moved its headquarters there. At the New York office in the 1940s, the major departments were: Political Department, Institute of Jewish Affairs, Relief and Rescue, Department for Culture and Education, and Organization Department. In 1940, the WJC opened a representative office in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The Holocaust and its aftermath

The WJC's initial priorities included safeguarding Jewish minority rights, combating anti-Semitism in Europe, and providing emergency relief to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. The WJC also concentrated on security for Jewish refugees and victims of the war. In 1939, the World Jewish Congress set up a relief committee for Jewish war refugees and cooperated with the International Committee of the Red Cross to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied countries.
File:Nahum Goldmann, Stephen Wise, Henri Torres at World Jewish Congress conference in New York, June 1942.jpg|upright=1.5|thumb|left|Left to right: Nahum Goldmann, Stephen Wise, and French lawyer Henry Torrès at a World Jewish Congress conference in New York City, 7 June 1942 Under the auspices of the WJC, 18 committees were set up in the United States composed of exiled representatives of the different European Jewish communities under Nazi rule. The committees were modeled on the governments-in-exile, and their task was to provide moral and material support for Jews in the respective countries, and to prepare a program of Jewish postwar demands. All representative committees together formed the Advisory Council on European Jewish Affairs, which came into being at a conference in New York City in June 1942.
The WJC also lobbied Allied governments on behalf of Jewish refugees, and urged US Jewish organizations to work towards waiving immigration quotas for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. In 1940, General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the French government in exile, pledged to the WJC that all measures taken by the Vichy regime against the Jews would be repudiated upon France's liberation.
In late 1941 and early 1942, Western diplomats and journalists received scattered information about Nazi massacres of many thousands of Jews in German-occupied Poland and Russia. However, the news was difficult to confirm. In June 1942, Ignacy Schwarzbart, one of two Jewish representatives on the Polish National Council of the Polish government-in-exile, held a press conference with WJC officials in London, where it was stated that an estimated one million Jews had already been murdered by the Germans.