Nahum Goldmann: Statesman without a State

5. Nahum Goldmann and the First Two Decades of the World Jewish Congress

5 ( Nahum Goldmann and the FirstTwo Decades of the World Jewish Congress Zohar Segev T he Seventeenth Zionist Congress convened in Basel in 1931. Nahum Goldmann was a prominent representative there, and, among other activities, joined the efforts to remove Chaim Weizmann from the Zionist movement’s presidency. In the wake of the Congress and his broad political activity in the early 1930s, Goldmann became a central activist in the world Zionist movement.1 Significant in this development was Goldmann’s intervention in the Jewish arena in the United States, which he visited for the first time and for an extensive period following the Congress. By his own testimony , he delivered his first address in English at the Hadassah Organization conference during that visit.2 A central aspect of Goldmann’s U.S. activities was the beginning of his especially close political and personal ties with Stephen S. Wise, a Reform rabbi and one of the most important American Zionist leaders until the mid-1940s. Wise initiated, and acted to establish the World Jewish Congress (WJC) from 1932 until its founding convention in Geneva in August 1936.3 Although the WJC was a new Jewish organization, its ideological origins can be traced back to developments within the American and European Jewish communities during and after World War I. The American Jewish Congress (AJC) formed in 1918 and joined in 1919 with similar Eastern European organizations to establish in Paris the 107 Comité des Delégation Juives. The organization Wise formed continued this path of a voluntary association of representative Jewish bodies, communities, and organizations throughout the world, organized to ensure the survival and to foster the unity of the Jewish people.4 A combination of circumstances between Goldmann’s rise to the status of Zionist leader at that time, and his contacts with Wise, made Goldmann an integral part of the WJC. It began with Goldmann persuading Jewish community representatives to take part in the organization, and continued through his help in preparing for the founding meeting, where he delivered a major address, until he finally emerged a central WJC figure from 1940 on, first in Europe and then in the United States. Goldmann served as president of the WJC after Wise, ordering his activity there as an important anchor in his political and public pursuits, until he retired from the presidency in 1977.5 The ideas on which the WJC were based—such as providing concrete content for the abstract concept of Jewish unity and joint defense of the rights of Jews everywhere—suited Goldmann’s public political approach, as evidenced throughout the many years of his open public activity.6 Goldmann’s activity within the WJC, and his especially close ties with Wise, enabled him to immigrate to the United States, where he lived for more than twenty years.7 Goldmann identified himself with Wise’s American goals regarding both the American and Zionist arenas, and acted with Wise as a partner of long-standing, not as a recent immigrant to the United States.8 Goldmann’s role in the WJC during his residence in the United States had significance beyond his actual position because that country was the center of Jewish and Zionist political activity from the end of the 1930s until the establishment of the state of Israel.9 Despite the definition in principle of the WJC as a worldwide organization, in practice its activities were centered and conducted in the United States. The European and South American offices were financed by American sources and reported back to the heads of the WJC in the United States. Such was the situation before World War II, and for obvious reasons it became even more pronounced after the war broke out.10 Goldmann and the WJC founders wished to create a broad international organization to represent the Jewish people. However, they found determining and defining their organization’s unique role in the shadow of the Zionist movement and other Jewish organizations difficult and did not succeed in recruiting the community’s rank and file.11 Comprehending the serious difficulties behind the operational failures of the WJC in the 1930s and 1940s is important. Nevertheless, despite its public weakness, the heads of the organization , particularly Goldmann and Wise, played an important role in open and secret contacts with the U.S. government, and operated in the name of the WJC to modulate the American Jewish community’s reaction to the Holocaust in accordance with their own worldview. Research on...