“Relief is a political gesture:” The Jewish Labor Committee’s interventions in war-torn Poland, 1939-1945

Abstract

This paper describes the role of an American organization, the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), in the support of Jewish people in Poland during World War II. In the context of the division and occupation of Poland by the USSR and by Nazi Germany, the JLC’s help materialized in two ways: relief (generally in kind) was sent to Jewish refugees in Russia; money was sent for relief and for weapons to Jews in the General Government region under German rule. In the latter situation, the JLC contributed to support the preparations for the insurrection of the Warsaw ghetto. The channels of information and transmission by which the JLC acted are described in both cases. The common Bundist political culture shared by both the leaders of the JLC in New York (former political refugees themselves) and the most influential political organizations in the ghetto explains the JLC’s ability to come into contact with leaders of the ghetto and to react immediately to the news of the systematic destruction of the Jewish population. In this extreme case, the nature of the JLC’s interventions, a bridge between two worlds, is defined as being political as well as humanitarian.