Review: Catherine Collomp’s Rescue, Relief, and Resistance: The Jewish Labor Committee’s Anti-Nazi Operations, 1934-1945

Reviewed by Natalia Dubno Shevin

Rescue, Relief, and Resistance: The Jewish Labor Committee’s Anti-Nazi Operations, 1934-1945
By Catherine Collomp
Translated by Susan Emanuel
Wayne State University Press, 2021
364 pages

Catherine Collomp’s Rescue, Relief, and Resistance: The Jewish Labor Committee’s Anti-Nazi Operations, 1934-1945 is the first monograph to uncover the rescues and aid that the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) provided to trade unionists, socialists, and Jews trapped in Europe after the rise of Nazism and fascism during the Second World War. The emergence of the JLC in 1934 and its successful rescue of 1,500 individuals from occupied France, via Spain and Portugal, and Polish Bundists from Lithuania, via the Soviet Union and Japan, reflected the strength of World War II-era Jewish labor in New York City. Jewish labor leaders in New York City, some former European socialist and labor members themselves, could facilitate communications necessary for rescues and inform the rest of the American labor movement about the rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe. Upon reflection in 1994, at an event at the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, where the JLC records are housed, Gus Tyler, a leader in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), termed the JLC's work during the 1930s and 40s, “rescue, relief, and resistance."

In 1933, the Third Reich had already begun targeting both Jews and the German labor movement. According to Baruch Charney Vladeck, the general manager of the socialist, Yiddish newspaper Jewish Daily Forward, the persecution of Jews and of the labor movement was interconnected. On February 25, 1934, Vladeck convened fellow labor and union leaders to discuss and coordinate aid and assistance to Jews and trade unionists in Europe, reflected by its advertisement as both the “People’s Conference Against Nazism and Fascism” and as the “Labor Conference for Jewish Affairs.” The one thousand delegates in attendance only represented a fraction of the JLC’s base, since Vladeck appealed to the strength of Jewish labor to build an Executive Committee and membership for the JLC, drawing from the 500,000 Jews among the unions, fraternal organizations, and labor parties in the mid-1930s. 

Personal connections held the JLC together. Vladeck’s political orientation prompted him to establish contacts with European socialist and social democratic parties, non-communist trade unionists and liberal anti-fascist militants, the Labor and Socialist International, the International Federation of Trade Unions, and former members of the Soviet Union's Menshevik Party, who, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, had sought refuge in Germany, then France, and elsewhere. The JLC also established connections to the larger American labor movement, largely through David Dubinsky. As president of the ILGWU, the JLC’s first treasurer, and member of the American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) Executive Council, Dubinsky could facilitate the relationship between the AFL and JLC. The JLC announced its founding at the AFL convention in the fall of 1934 and established the AFL War Chest, collecting funds to assist European socialist and labor leaders, with Dubinsky as treasurer.

The JLC’s work took multiple forms, and the organization of Rescue, Relief, and Resistance chapters reflects how Jewish labor developed a strategy over time, both in the context of unfolding war and related government restriction of immigration. The JLC conducted most of its rescues between July 1940 and December 1941, the period after the Nazis occupied of France in July 1940 and shortly after, the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania. In these eighteen months, the JLC rescued approximately 1,500 trade unionists and socialists in France and Bundists in Lithuania. In a momentary period of favor with the State Department, Isaiah Minkoff, executive director of the JLC, wrote Secretary of State Cordell Hull asking that refugees in France and Lithuania involved in social democratic movements be allowed asylum in the United States. The next day, Hull’s assistant, Breckinridge Long, wrote to AFL president William Green to accept the request. While other visa requests required affidavits and visas for third countries, Collomp writes, “the simple mention of persons on the ‘AFL lists’ would qualify as an affidavit (political, moral, and financial) in lieu of any other document required by the State Department.” The lists prepared by the JLC exemplified its connection with the realities of the danger of labor leaders and other opponents to Nazi and fascist regimes. For example, the list that the JLC submitted to the State Department and the consulate in Marseille of Italian opponents of fascism taking refuge in France “was scarcely different… except for the Communists” to that of the one that the Italian police submitted to the German police on October 5, 1940, listing the 123 “‘dangerous subversives’ they [the Italian police] wanted arrested and handed over to the Italian authorities at the border.” Month after month, the JLC welcomed new arrivals to the United States. Their presence further enabled the JLC’s ability to aid underground resistance movements, serving as crucial contacts to France and Poland, especially after the State Department ordered the end to visas in 1941.

The JLC relied on the recent arrivals to continue their work, especially due to the changing instructions from the State Department and diplomatic relationships as a result of United States entry into the war. After Long ordered the end to visas for those in Germany, Austria, Italy, and the Soviet Union, the JLC shifted its role from funding ship tickets for refugees and their daily expenses before departure to funding clandestine resistance. Individuals such as Ewa Lewinski, who reached the United States due to the JLC, now relayed information to Paul Vignaux and Paul Hagen in order to fund resistance in the southern zone of France. Due to United States entry in the war and the subsequent relevance of the Trading with Enemy Act, the AFL could not fund underground resistance movements in countries the United States had declared war against. In order to circumvent this law, a recent group of arrivals, whose emigration the JLC had aided, formed the Council for the Underground Labor Movement in Nazi-Dominated Countries (CULM) to operate the AFL’s War Chest. As the options for resistance from the United States shrunk, the JLC continued to maneuver through limitations that governments imposed.

As the war progressed, the JLC knew it could no longer distinguish the threat that Nazism and communism posed for trade unionists, socialists, and Jewish leaders than it could against the general danger posed to civilians. In May 1942, the JLC learned of the Final Solution through Szmul Zygielbojm, appointed to the Polish government in exile in London, who facilitated contact between Bundists in Poland and the Bund Representation in New York. Zygielbojm confirmed that mass murders had begun in the Warsaw Ghetto, and Jan Karski, Polish underground messenger, confirmed this in December of that year. Through Zygielbojm, the JLC could transfer funds to the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto and receive information in return. The JLC shared this information as widely as it could, from speaking at the AFL convention, publishing reports in The New York Times and the Jewish Daily Forward, to meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. JLC leaders gathered these stories to curate an exhibition in New York City titled, “Martyrs and Heroes of the Ghetto,” which opened in the spring of 1945. The JLC would continue its aid work well into the 1950s by supporting survivors, particularly orphans, and Jewish communal institutions.

With limited information and resources, and frequent changes to immigration bureaucracy in more than a dozen countries, members of the JLC worked tirelessly, although always insufficiently, against Nazism and fascism. Rescue, Relief, and Resistance, now available to English-language audience due to Susan Emanuel’s translation of Collomp’s Resister au nazisme: Le Jewish Labor Committee, New York, 1934-1945 (2016), will be of interest to scholars of labor and Jewish history, as well as those interested in understanding what resistance against Nazism and fascism looked like far from Nazi-occupied regions of Europe, from offices in New York City.

Natalia Dubno Shevin is a doctoral student at New York University in the departments of history and Hebrew and Judaic Studies. She researches labor diplomacy and twentieth century Jewish history.