50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany by Steven Pressman

first group had been settled in good homes.
    The Brith Sholom leader solemnly added that the organization had the power to “make or break” the rescue plan. He then introduced Gil, though everyone in the room already knew him. By the end of the evening, the men from Brith Sholom promised to raise $150,000 in support of the plan.
    Two days later, the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger published a two-paragraph item announcing that a project “to bring refugee children from Germany to Philadelphia is under consideration” by the Jewish fraternal organization. A slightly longer article appeared in that week’s Philadelphia Jewish Times . “Grand Master Levine was assured that the entire national membership is eager to cooperate,” reported the newspaper.
    Word was spreading about the rescue project. But not everyone liked what they heard. Brith Sholom was not the only organization—Jewish or otherwise—interested in bringing Jewish children into the United States. Others, in fact, had been trying for some time to set into action similar missions, but with little or no success to show for their efforts. “We had a telephone message from Philadelphia stating that Brith Sholom is collecting funds and is making arrangements to set up a home for fifty children who are due to arrive here very shortly,” Blanche Goldman, the chairman of German-Jewish Children’s Aid, wrote on February 28 to A. M. Warren, the State Department’s visa official. “As you know, German-Jewish Children’s Aid has been carrying on a project of bringing children to the United States within the quota on an individual basis, and that recently very few children have been arriving because of the delay in the issuance of quota visas to them.” The Brith Sholom plan, she told Warren, “is naturally very embarrassing for our organization.”
    But Goldman’s letter did not accurately reflect the Brith Sholom plan. She was under the impression, for example, that Brith Sholom had recently received a letter from Under Secretary of State Welles that supposedly authorized the group to bring in up to 250 children above and beyond the regular quota limits for Germany and Austria. Welles never sent such a letter, and Gil, for his part, was aware that all of the children would have to qualify under the existing German quota. In his response to Goldman a few days later, Warren made no mention of the supposed letter from Welles. Instead he wrote that he had just spoken the day before with Brith Sholom officials “who assured me categorically that they do not intend to bring any immigrant children into the United States outside of the quota restrictions.”
    These assurances did little to mollify Goldman’s group, which had been trying, along with others, to bring Jewish children into the United States ever since Hitler came to power. In the fall of 1933, representatives from the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, and B’nai B’rith formed a committee to develop a plan for rescuing Jewish children living in Germany. They debated the matter for several months before the project was placed in the hands of German Jewish Children’s Aid, which was led by Cecilia Razovsky, a social worker who strenuously advocated for admitting Jewish refugees. After a period of frustrating negotiations with various immigration officials, an initial group of ten Jewish children from Germany finally arrived in New York in November 1934. But news of their arrival was quickly followed by stinging criticism from a group that called itself the American Coalition of Patriotic, Civil and Fraternal Societies, which accused the government of cooperating in the “systematic importation of indigent alien children.” German Jewish Children’s Aid also found it difficult to find enough Jewish families willing to take in children. As a result, only about one hundred children were admitted between November 1934 and April 1935, after which Razovsky’s group stopped sending