Summary
Organisation of prominent pro-Zionist Gentiles, chaired from 1941 by New York Senator Robert Wagner, whose mission was to keep the issue of Palestine as a Jewish homeland before the public, in Perceptions of Palestine (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 620-626).
Details
- The committee had originally been formed in 1932 by several congressmen and had gone inactive; by its formal reconstitution in April 1941 it had among its members sixty-eight senators, including the majority and minority leaders, as well as two hundred congressmen, several governors and two cabinet members, and within a year eight hundred “distinguished citizens” in several local chapters throughout the country (lines 620-626).
- Although the organisation was non-Jewish, it was run out of Zionist offices in New York, and Zionist functionaries wrote Wagner’s correspondence and in one instance an article for publication (lines 620-626).
- Wagner is classed by historians, as Christison reports, as both genuinely interested in the fate of the Jews during World War II and politically aware of the large numbers of Jewish voters in his state (lines 620-626).