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We Were There
Southwestern Jewish Press, April 10, 1947:

By Albert Hutler

By flickering candle light in a displaced person's camp—in the clean white dining hall of hospitals and sanitariums, in orphanages and in homes for the aged, on cooperative farms and in crude dwellings throughout Europe, Jews are celebrating the feast of Passover again this year.

Men, women and children are sitting down together to observe the deliverance of their ancesotrs from Egypt more than 3,200 years ago and to celebrate their own deliverance from Nazism.

And yet, these people are not free.  They are figuratively and literally still behind barbed wires. Many continue to live in displaced persons' centers like Bergen-Belsen, which was once a concentration camp and where they saw their families murdered in crematories and gas chambers. Is it freedom when they have no privacy and still continue to live in barrack buildings, 30 and 40 to a room?  Is it freedom when they wait in line for hours for their meal of coffee and bread or thick soup? Is it freedom when they continue to live inlands which do not want them, on an earth which is drenched with the blood of their children, in a land where they themselves do not wish to remain?

Passover 1947 and the Jews of Europe sit at their Passover table as the sun goes down and observe their deliverance from Nazism.  Their hopes are based upon what the American Jews will do.  They do not ask for charity. They ask only for opportunity.  We are the only ones who can give them that opportunity.  All over the United States Jews who understand the problems deem it a privilege to give so that the Jews of Europe may have hope.  The hearts of the Jews of San Diego are not different than Jews in other cities.  Give them hope through your contribution to the United Jewish Fund.