Louis Phlips: Blog Post #3

Sunday was an interesting day packed with many powerful and informative moments at Mount Herzl and Yad Vashem. Nestled into a hillside overlooking Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem vally stands Yad Vashem, the historic museum that commemorates the events of the holocaust and the 6 million Jews who perished during Nazi Germany’s rule over Europe. The exhibits in the museum trace the development of anti-Semitism, the silence or coloration of much of the world and the actions of a few of the Righteous gentiles. The memorial strips away the fantasy of those who might try to deny that the Holocaust happened. Not only did the museum make a deep impression, but it made me ponder more about what efforts were made by the international community to save the Jews fleeing from Germany before World War 2 began.

As we learned in class, it became increasingly more difficult for the Jewish diaspora to escape from Europe in the years leading up to the Holocaust. While many Jews tried to flee Europe and relocate, they had very limited opportunities to do so; for example many Jews who tried to immigrate to the United States were unable to do so due to stringent American immigration policies. This did not only happen in the United States, but was a very common theme in the Western world. At the museum I read a quote of a statement made by a Canadian immigration officer at the time that summed up the situation: “None is too many”.

Nations that were in the best position to accept large number of Jewish refugees consistently refused to open their gates; the United States for example had set up quotas in regards to country of origin of the immigrant, which ended up closing the doors to prospective immigrants from the Third Reich. Great Britain, which had a somewhat more liberal approach to immigration, also took measures to severely limit Jewish immigration to Palestine; in 1939 the British issued a “White Paper”, which limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 Jews over the next five years. This decision prevented hundreds of thousands of Jews from escaping Europe. Had the Western powers allowed Jewish immigration, it is clear that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Jews could potentially have been saved.