Laura Margolis Jarblum | |
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| Born | Laura Leah Margolis October 19, 1903 |
| Died | September 9, 1997 (aged 93) |
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | Laura Margolis Jarblum |
| Occupation | Social worker |
| Movement | American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee |
Laura Margolis Jarblum (1903-1997) was the first female overseas representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and the JDC's first female Country Director. [1]
Laura Leah Margolis was born October 19, 1903, in Constantinople (now Istanbul). Her father, Herman Margolis, was a halutz and agronomist and her mother Cecilia was the daughter of Dr. Solomon Schwartz, the personal physician to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Herman Margolis moved to Dayton, Ohio in 1907 and Cecilia, Margolis and her younger brother, Otto, joined him in 1908, eventually settling in Cleveland, Ohio. Margolis received her Bachelor of Science from Ohio State University in 1926 and a professional degree in social work from the School of Applied Social Sciences at Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1927. In the 1930s, Margolis worked for various Jewish social service organizations, including the Jewish Social Services in Cleveland, Jewish Social Service Association in New York City and the Jewish Welfare Society in Buffalo, NY.
In January 1939, Margolis became the first female field agent of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee when Cecilia Razovsky of the National Refugee Service, an agency associated with the JDC, hired her to go to Cuba. [2] In Cuba, she worked closely with American consular officials to help the approximately 5,000 refugees who had arrived from Europe, mostly Germany and Austria. When the MS St. Louis with its 900 passengers was approaching Havana harbor in May 1939, Margolis tried to find a port of entry in either Cuba, the United States or Canada, but the ship was forced to return to Europe. [1]
In light of Margolis’ overall success in Cuba, officials from the United States State Department requested that the JDC send her to Shanghai in May 1941 in order to assist United States' consular officials. Of the approximately 20,000 Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria then in Shanghai, around 8,000 refugees received at least one meal each day from JDC soup kitchens. [3] In the months before the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, Margolis modernized the soup kitchens, making them more efficient and better able to serve the refugee community. Margolis was interned as an enemy alien by the Japanese from February 1943 through September 1943, when she was released as part of a prisoner exchange. [4] Even during her internment, she ensured that the soup kitchens remained open.
Margolis returned to the United States in December 1943, where she found out for the first time about the extent of the extermination of the Jews in Europe and the existence of the concentration camps. [2] She insisted that she be sent to Europe, although JDC officials were hesitant to send a woman into an active war zone. [3] She arrived in Lisbon in March 1944 and then traveled to Spain, where she was active in arranging a home for children smuggled over the Pyrenees Mountains from France. She then traveled to Sweden, where she organized sending relief supplies from Stockholm to Theresienstadt and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. She traveled to liberated Belgium in January 1945, where she was the JDC representative in Belgium and where she first encountered concentration camp survivors returning from Germany and Eastern Europe. She worked with survivors, children's homes, homes for the aged, and aided Palestine Jewish Brigade members helping survivors travel through Belgium to Palestine. She also traveled to the Netherlands to aid the Dutch Jewish community, entering Amsterdam twenty-four hours after the Germans had left. [3] She was decorated by the Belgian government for her work.
Margolis was sent to France in 1946 as the JDC's first female Country Director, where she helped rebuild the French Jewish community, including setting up children’s homes, establishing vocational training programs, providing aid for the sick and elderly, and aided people working on illegal immigration to Palestine. In 1950, Margolis married Zionist leader Marc Jarblum (1887–1972). Jarblum was the editor of two Poale Zion Yiddish newspapers in Paris and was also active in the Resistance during World War II. The Jarblums immigrated to Israel in 1953 where Margolis served as the Director of Social Services for Malben, an organization set up in 1949 by the JDC as a system of services and organizations to care for elderly, chronically ill and handicapped immigrants to Israel. At the end of 1955 she was drafted by the Jewish Agency to work with new immigrants in the new development towns, where she remained until 1958, when she returned to Malben as Director for Special Projects, working with handicapped children and adults. [3]
Marc Jarblum died in 1972. Laura Margolis remained at Malben until 1974, when she retired, after which she returned to the United States. Laura Margolis Jarblum died on September 9, 1997, at the home of her nephew, James A. Margolis, in Brookline, Massachusetts at the age of 93. [1]
Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat who served as vice-consul for the Japanese Empire in Kaunas, Lithuania. During the Second World War, Sugihara helped thousands of Jews flee Europe by issuing transit visas to them so that they could travel through Japanese territory, risking his job and the lives of his family. The fleeing Jews were refugees from German-occupied Western Poland and Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland, as well as residents of Lithuania. In 1985, the State of Israel honored Sugihara as one of the Righteous Among the Nations for his actions. He is the only Japanese national to have been so honored. In Lithuania, 2020 was "The Year of Chiune Sugihara". It has been estimated as many as 100,000 people alive today are the descendants of the recipients of Sugihara visas.
MS St. Louis was a diesel-powered passenger ship properly referred to with the prefix MS or MV, built by the Bremer Vulkan shipyards in Bremen for HAPAG, better known in English as the Hamburg America Line. The ship was named after the city of St. Louis, Missouri. Her sister ship, MS Milwaukee, was also a diesel powered motor vessel owned by the Hamburg America Line. St. Louis regularly sailed the trans-Atlantic route from Hamburg to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and New York City, and made cruises to the Canary Islands, Madeira, Spain; and Morocco. St. Louis was built for both transatlantic liner service and for leisure cruises.
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, also known as Joint or JDC, is a Jewish relief organization based in New York City. Since 1914 the organisation has supported Jewish people living in Israel and throughout the world. The organization is active in more than 70 countries.
The Shanghai Ghetto, formally known as the Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees, was an area of approximately one square mile in the Hongkou district of Japanese-occupied Shanghai. The area included the community around the Ohel Moshe Synagogue. Shanghai was notable for a long period as the only place in the world that unconditionally offered refuge for Jews escaping from the Nazis. After the Japanese occupied all of Shanghai in 1941, the Japanese army forced about 23,000 of the city's Jewish refugees to be restricted or relocated to the Shanghai Ghetto from 1941 to 1945 by the Proclamation Concerning Restriction of Residence and Business of Stateless Refugees. It was one of the poorest and most crowded areas of the city. Local Jewish families and American Jewish charities aided them with shelter, food, and clothing. The Japanese authorities increasingly stepped up restrictions, surrounded the ghetto with barbed wire, and the local Chinese residents, whose living conditions were often as bad, did not leave. By 21 August 1941, the Japanese government closed Shanghai to Jewish immigration.
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Moses W. Beckelman was a social worker from New York City. He began his career with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in 1939, becoming its director-general in 1951.
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The National Refugee Service (NRS) was a refugee aid organization founded in New York City on 15 May 1939 to assist refugees from Europe fleeing Nazi persecution. It represented a reorganization of a predecessor organization, the National Coordinating Committee for Aid to Refugees and Emigrants Coming from Germany (NCC), which had been in operation since 1934 as an umbrella organization of refugee aid agencies.p. 364-365 The National Refugee Service remained in existence until August 1946, when it merged with the Service for Foreign Born of the National Council of Jewish Women to form the new organization United Service for New Americans.
Cecila Davidson Razovsky was a Jewish American social worker and activist for immigrants in the US.
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The Jewish Transmigration Bureau was a relief agency created by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in the early years of World War II to provide funds for the emigration of Jews from European countries where they faced persecution. From 1940-56, the Bureau received donations from tens of thousands of American donors to cover the travel costs of prospective emigrants. These funds allowed Jewish beneficiaries from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg to settle in over 40 countries in Western Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia. "Deposit cards," thousands of which are extant and publicly searchable, link the names of emigrants with the depositor who provided the funds to cover the cost of their relocation.
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Bernard Cantor was an American-born, Reform rabbi with experience in social work who volunteered to work as an emissary for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Poland and the Ukraine following World War I and the Russian Revolution, providing relief to Jewish communities there, until he was murdered along with his colleague, Dr. Israel Friedlander, while on a philanthropic mission.
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