In June 1933, five months after Hitler’s appointment to the Chancellorship of Germany, nearly 500,000 people of the ‘Mosaic faith’ lived in Germany.¹ An unknown further number of those of Jewish origin who had either abandoned their beliefs or been converted to some branch of Christianity, were soon to be defined by Nazi legislation as Jewish by race, and therefore as the proper subject of official discrimination. The number of Jews of both kinds under Nazi control was increased by the Nazi occupation of Austria, with its 190,000 Jews, in March 1938 and of Bohemia and Moravia, in the March...

Early in 1938 the Manchester Ladies Lodge of B’nai Brith, probably the most influential women’s organisation in Manchester’s Jewish community, persuaded the director of Manchester Central Library to stage a ‘Jewish Book Week’ on 4–9 April of that year.¹ The prime mover was almost certainly Collette Hassan, president of the lodge and the wife of a Sephardi cotton merchant, Victor Hassan. It was Collette Hassan who became chairman of a Jewish Book Week Committee of thirty-four prominent members of the Jewish community and who wrote the introduction to the brochure associated with the event. Preparations were proceeding smoothly in...

Amongst those in Britain who protested against Nazi anti-Semitism after the Nazi government launched a boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933 was a World Alliance Against Anti-Semitism, with its ‘British Empire Headquarters’ in London. In May 1933 the Alliance published a pamphletJ’accuse!,detailing anti-Semitic barbarity in Germany and encouraging a militant response in Britain. The pamphlet² included ‘messages’ from leading British churchmen, politicians and businessmen condemning Nazi atrocities in the name of the British humanitarian tradition and the values of western civilisation. The harassment and murder of German Jews, the circumstances in which others were led to...

In September 1967 Dr Heinz Kroch, the German-Jewish refugee from Berlin who thirty years earlier had founded the Lankro Chemical Company in Eccles, an industrial town of some 45,000 people four miles west of Manchester, was presented by the Mayor of Eccles with a casket and scroll to honour his admission to the Roll of Freemen of the Borough.¹ It was an occasion notable, amongst other things, as the first on which the Freedom had been conferred on anyone who had not served on the aldermanic bench. The local councillor who introduced Dr Kroch to the audience in Eccles Town...

The Society of Friends (otherwise, the Quakers), which from November 1938 was going to share with the Jewish community the rescue and support of refugees, in earlier years was as slow off the mark as the Jewish community, although for very different reasons. The problem for the Quakers was that of reconciling their objective of international harmony with the rescue of Jews from Germany, one of the chief national fields of their welfare services and missionary endeavour. In their eyes, too, the rise of Nazism, and the economic crisis and sense of national humiliation which had helped bring it about,...

In applying immigration law, the British government made the occasional concession and its agents at the ports of entry their occasional mistake. Through negligence or persuasion, passports were not imprinted with the necessary restrictions. Refugees arriving at destinations other than the official ports of entry walked ashore without official intervention. Even at the specified ports of entry, it was occasionally possible to by-pass the immigration officers.¹ The first substantial and official departure from the regulations imposed under the Aliens Acts of 1905, 1914 and 1919, however, was effected by the Civil War in Spain, when, in May 1937, a powerful...

The decisive factor which drew provincial communities into the more systematic rescue of refugees was the escalating number of those seeking entry to Britain following the Anschluss (March 1938), the German occupation of the Sudetenland (October 1938), the Kristallnacht pogrom (9 November 1938), the British Government’s decision to facilitate the entry of unaccompanied children on the Kindertransport (21 November 1938) and the German annexation of Bohemia and Moravia (March 1939). As the sources of emigration multiplied and the Jews of Germany became finally convinced of the permanence of the Nazi regime and the centrality of its anti-Semitic intentions, Britain received...

In the face of an increasing number of refugees reaching Manchester, the Quaker ISC could not justify any more than the Jewish community, what was at best a haphazard response to their needs. On 20 October 1938, the ISC declared itself ‘seriously concerned with the need to help the increasing number of Refugees in this country. We suggest that a panel of Friends be drawn up showing those able and willing to take refugees for varying periods.’ The causes of this sudden ‘serious concern’ are not clear. The sense of a ‘refugee crisis’ had been developing since the Anschluss in...

In taking responsibility for refugees from Czechoslovakia, the Quakers were brought into contact with political refugees, Communists and Social Democrats, brought to Britain by the Czech Refugee Trust Fund. Some of them were experienced members of the German KPD who, following the emergence of the Nazi regime, had taken refuge in Prague, from where, at least at first, they had cherished the hope of building an anti-Nazi existence in Germany. Some had been sent on what turned out to be unproductive missions to Germany for just this purpose. Arriving in Britain in 1938, their ideological solidarity, their continuing sense of...

As this report suggests, the Quakers were the only organised body of Christians in Manchester to take collective measures for the rescue of the victims of Nazism. Individuals of the Christian faith – Methodists, Congregationalists and Unitarians – were to be found in refugee support organisations and amongst the advocates of tolerance towards refugees, but the branches of Christianity to which they belonged engaged in no concerted action on the refugees’ behalf. For some this may simply have been a matter of convenience in the absence of refugees of their own denominations in any number. For the Roman Catholic Church...

The same meeting of the MJRC on 6 December 1938 to which Arthur Kershaw had been invited to outline his plans for a hostel in south Manchester was attended by another group of friends, this one led by Eli Fox, with proposals for the creation of a hostel to the north of the city. It was probably in late November that the insurance broker, Eli Fox, and the building contractor, Adolf Cassel, paid £8,000 for a house at 20 Upper Park Road, Higher Broughton, set in one-and-a-half acres, which might serve as a hostel, they believed, for fifty young people...

On 6 December 1938, as it sought to define its remit, the MJRC was given to understand by members of the Livingstone family of Southport that a local committee there had obtained premises at 27 Argyle Road, in a fashionable residential district near the town centre, at a rental of £900 for four years, which it proposed to convert into a hostel for twelve children. Approval had been obtained from Woburn House and the committee now sought the imprimatur of the MJRC, of which it perhaps saw itself as a potential satellite.¹ On 12 December, after the MJRC had delayed...

A revival of interest in refugees within the Manchester B’nai Brith Women’s Lodge, following the collapse of its Hospitality Committee in 1935, was apparently sparked off by the same chain of international events and those same pressures from Woburn House which had brought the MJRC into being. Early in November 1938 Colette Hassan brought back from ‘a refugee meeting’ she had attended in London an ‘urgent appeal for help’.¹ A joint meeting of the Manchester’s men’s and women’s B’nai Brith lodges which followed on 7 November was addressed by Bernard Davidson, from the Jewish Refugees Committee in London, who on...

In 1933 the Zionist movement in Manchester was already fifty years old. The first Manchester Jewish organisation to promote the colonisation of what was then Ottoman Palestine was founded in 1884, the first body seeking the creation of a Jewish state in 1896, the year of publication of Theodore Herzl’sJudenstaat. In the following year, at least four delegates from Manchester attended the first Zionist Congress in Basle. Since the 1890s Isaiah Wassilevsky, whosechederin Cheetham was favoured by the well-to-do, had been a leading figure in the revival of Hebrew as a modern language.¹ By 1900 the community...

On 29 November 1938, David Blank, a prominent solicitor living in Stockport, announced to the MJRC, of which he was a founder member, that the Stockport Hebrew Congregation, of which he was the treasurer, had decided to take responsibility for ten refugee children.¹ It is not clear who took the initiative. David Blank’s widow remembers a visit to their home in Heaton Chapel by Norman Jacobs, the MJRC’s chairman, followed by a short business meeting at which important decisions had clearly been made. Blank himself had important Manchester connections:² his offices were in St Peter’s Square in central Manchester; his...

Of all the reversals of attitude which followed the changing international situation after March 1938, the most dramatic was that of the Manchester Yeshiva. Between 1933 and early 1938, in the face of severe financial restraints and the pressure of communal concerns, the natural empathy of the Yeshiva’s managers with their beleaguered co-religionists abroad persuaded them to accept only three foreign students, two from Germany, one, a Roumanian by birth, from Czechoslovakia. Less than eighteen months later, at the beginning of the summer term of 1939, its student body comprised fifty-six young foreigners, thirty-two from Germany, twenty-three from Czechoslovakia and...

Late in 1938, ‘after careful consideration and after consultation with the Council of Manchester and Salford Jews’, and almost certainly at the prompting of its secretary, Morris Feinmann, the Home for Aged, Needy and Incurable Jews and Temporary Shelter in Cheetham Hill, which had served the community since 1896, and which then regarded itself as ‘one of the foremost institutions of its kind in this country’, decided to offer accommodation to thirty German Jewish refugees. With the purchase of a house next to its existing buildings and adjacent to the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the Home’s Board of Management¹ believed...

One way in which young refugees might gain the right of entry to Britain was by offering proof of their acceptance by a British school, although they still required a British sponsor who would guarantee to cover the cost of their accommodation, their maintenance and such fees as the school demanded. Britain’s twelve Quaker boarding schools are said to have offered, between them, 100 scholarships to refugees, although some, like Peter and Hans Kurer, among the forty refugee scholars at Great Ayton School in Yorkshire, had already arrived in Britain with their parents.¹ Winchester College offered five free places to...

It does not appear than any other Christian denomination but the Quakers set up a refugee committee or in other ways reached out consistently to refugees. William Hodgkins, minister of the Congregationalist Chapel in Oldham Road, wrote articles in support of refugees in theManchester City News, including one which lavished fulsome praise on the refugees for their contribution to Manchester life, but there is no evidence that he or his chapel were otherwise active on their behalf. There is reference in the minutes of the QRC to a ‘Catholic Committee’, but it seems likely that this was either the...

Scattered throughout the earlier chapters are references to the anxieties of unaccompanied child refugees about the fate of their parents. This is, in fact, a theme in refugee history most often marginalised by those who wish to emphasise the humanity of the British state in the rescue of refugees. Such concessions as the government sanctioned need to be measured against the desperation of those seeking entry from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia after March 1938.

Between July and September 1939 the columns of ‘refugee advertisements’ in theManchester Guardianand theJewish Chronicleincluded cries for help of increasing (and heart-breaking)...

Following the outbreak of war, when the flow of refugees from Nazi Europe came to an abrupt end, both major refugee committees in Manchester turned their attention to the task of supporting, morally and financially, some of the 8,000 refugees who had already arrived in the region. Recognising that the funds of voluntary agencies had been all but exhausted by the work of reception, and accepting, for the first time, direct responsibility for the welfare of refugees, the government now stepped in with increasingly substantial subsidies. Within the voluntary bodies themselves, case work for intending refugees gave way to a...

Already in this book we have met many ‘exceptional people’: people, that is, who went far beyond the ordinary bounds of compassion to concern themselves with those with whom, for the most part, they had no close personal ties. They include the volunteers who worked for the Jewish, Quaker and Rotarian refugee committees. In a paper delivered in 1944 Rae Barash posed the question of why volunteers like herself had committed themselves to work with refugees. She answered: ‘My own reason as a Jewess: “There but for the grace of God” … [but] the reason for all of us, whatever...

It was probably the case with the Manchester of the 1930s, as it certainly was in earlier years, that the parts did not quite add up to the desired whole. The city cannot be described, without strong reservations, as the ‘liberal city’ which Manchester’s articulate middle-class believed it to be. In the 1880s and 1890s immigrants from Eastern Europe, while welcomed by a liberal paper like theManchester Guardian, and by a liberal-minded elite, had been met by an outburst of anti-alien and anti-Semitic sentiment by other elements in the population and in other sections of the local press. A...