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We Were There
Southwestern Jewish Press, January 16, 1947:

By Albert Hutler

Yesterday two men, Wollheim and Shlomowitz, rolled away a year from my life and took me back to Germany. They were representing the Displaced Persons in the American and British Zones of Germany at the United Palestine Appeal conference in Los Angeles.  I was once again sitting in the dining hall of the Jewish Displaced Persons at Stuttgart and listening to them speaking in Yiddish and English. We knew their hopes for peace, for security and for liberation. Again I could hear Meyer Guttman, chairman of the Jews of Stuttgart, asking in the name of all his Jews the right to live again in Palestine. There was little bitterness in his speech, but there was a great deal of faith.

And yesterday in Los Angeles there was little bitterness in the pleas made by Wollheim and Shlomowitz.  They only felt that we would forget them, and as Wollheim said: "The greatest tragedy is to be forgotten."  They brought a message to American Jewry which we, who were there, know only too well. The Jewish Displaced Persons, 225,000 of them, have been saved but not liberated. They have suffered, but are not broken. "Not relief, in the form of charity, but in the form of resettlement and rebirth and a new life is what we need!"

With the ending of UNRRA, and the lack of intergovernmental assistance, the problem falls more heavily on the Jews of America. The thesis of the United Palestine Appeal conference in Los Angeles which was really a United Jewish Welfare Fund meeting, can well be accepted by every thinking community in America.  Taht slogan should be taken to heart by those of us in San Diego.  The chairman of the conference, Julius Fleigelman, beautifully expressed the thought of American Jews when he opened the conference with these words: "WHEN THE WORLD CARES LESS WE MUST CARE MORE."