The Baltimore Jewish Times has been writing about and documenting the local Jewish community for more than a century. And once a month, in our Remember When section, we share a page from our archives.
While looking through the black bound books that contain old issues of the JT, I came across this letter.
This letter was published April 26, 1946, less than a year after the end of World War II. It was written by Sidney Lansburgh, president of the Jewish Welfare Fund of Baltimore. In it, Lansburgh asks the community for about $1.5 million — about $24 million today — for a campaign to support Holocaust survivors in Europe.
According to The Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore’s website, the Jewish Welfare Fund was founded in the 1940s to help effectively fundraise for national and international organizations, often in response to Nazi atrocities. A few decades later, JWF merged with the Associated Jewish Charities, which, in 1990, changed its name to The Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore.
“A million and a half Jews in Europe are in dire need of help,” Lansburgh writes in the 1946 letter published in the JT. “They are the only survivors of the seven and a half million Jews who lived in Germany before Hitler. Six million have been murdered — only this pitiful remnant remains.”
A powerful letter — especially at this moment in time, just a little more than six months after Oct. 7, the deadliest day for Jews since the end of the Holocaust. Just like then, the Baltimore Jewish community continues to fundraise and support Jewish people all over the world who are in need of aid.
