World Jewish Relief - Founding and Beginning Operations

Founding and Beginning Operations

WJR was originally called the Central British Fund for German Jewry (CBF) and was founded in 1933. CBF was founded following a meeting of UK Jewish community leaders with Members of Parliament. Founding members included Simon Marks, chairman and managing director of Marks & Spencer, Sir Robert Waley Cohen, managing director of Shell Oil, Lionel and Anthony de Rothschild, managing partners of N M Rothschild & Sons, and Dr Chaim Weizmann, who would later become the first President of Israel. Originally intended to provide support for German Jews who were immigrating to the British Mandate of Palestine, CBF originally funded projects such at Hebrew University, the Technion, and the Maccabi World Union so that these organisations could provide immigrants with the skills and experience needed to become functional members of society in Palestine.

Due to funding problems, CBF increasingly turned its efforts away from Palestine and towards Britain. By 1935, CBF and the Jewish Refugees Committee (JRC) were funding a programme that placed Jewish scholars in British universities willing to take on faculty members and graduate students. The two programmes placed more than 200 refugees at universities, including Ernst Chain, whose subsequent work on penicillin earned him a Nobel Prize.

CBF coordinated with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in 1936 to create the Council for German Jewry, which carried out much of the pre-war operations to emigrate German Jews. Resulting from the German-Austrian Anschluss in 1938, thousands of new refugees in Austria looked to emigrate. Due to the volume of need for refugees, the Council for German Jewry attended the Évian Conference in France to push world leaders for less restrictive immigration policies, but they were largely ignored. The advent of Kristallnacht later in that year exacerbated the refugee crisis, leaving the JRC overwhelmed in both financial and human resource capacity. The Council for German Jewry was eventually able to persuade the UK Home Office to admit Jews regardless of financial backing, and consequently 68,000 Jews registered before the start of war. For its part, CBF worked with the NGO Save the Children to establish the Inter-Aid Committee, which helped 471 Jewish and Christian children go to boarding schools in Britain.