(JEWISH GROUP) Jabotinsky letter revealing plea for funds to save European Jews heads to auction [View all]

A letter signed by Revisionist Zionism founder Ze’ev Jabotinsky as he raced to fund a mass evacuation of European Jews in the shadow of the coming Holocaust will be auctioned online on Thursday, American auction house Nate D. Sanders announced on Monday.

The Yiddish-German letter — penned just weeks before Nazi Germany annexed Austria — was intended to address funding for Jabotinsky’s evacuation plan for Jews before Nazi occupation, militia operations, and diplomatic campaigns.


At the time the letter was written in early 1938, Jabotinsky was advocating for a plan to resettle 1.5 million European Jews illegally in the British Mandate for Palestine over the course of a decade. This plan was fiercely rejected by Jewish and other Zionist groups for fear that it would exacerbate antisemitism in European countries, already reeling from the rise of Nazism.

Simultaneously, Jabotinsky was working to fund his Irgun paramilitary organization’s escalating activities, which he directed from his base in London, as British authorities had barred him from returning to Palestine.

more...