Out of the Archives: From Labor to Justice
by Rachel C. Miller, Senior Project Archivist, Center for Jewish History

The quotidian cross-out on this letterhead represents a pivotal moment in U.S. immigration history, when, following the outbreak of war in Europe, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration deemed immigration a security concern over an economic one and transferred the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice.  Such a large structural shift on immigration within the government would not occur again until 2003 when immigration was moved to the Department of Homeland Security.

Just one month after the INS department change went into effect, Earl G. Harrison, then Director of Alien Registration at the INS, wrote the above letter to Ambrose Doskow.  Harrison would go on to author the Harrison Report, a critical examination of the U.S. military’s treatment of DP camp populations.  The recipient of this letter, Ambrose Doskow, was serving as the Counsel on the General Jewish Council’s Public Relations Committee, tasked with reviewing U.S. legislation that would have an impact on minorities and the Jewish population more specifically.  

The records of the General Jewish Council, housed at the American Jewish Historical Society, are currently being processed as part of the Center’s Holocaust Resources Initiative, funded by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Inc.  The General Jewish Council was founded by the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith, and the Jewish Labor Committee in 1938 in a short-lived effort to unify the minority rights defense activities of the four organizations.  The Council was formally dissolved in 1944, succeeded by the defense and federation agencies’ next effort at unification: the National Community Relations Advisory Council.  The records of the National Community Relations Advisory Council can also be found at AJHS, as well as the papers of Cecilia Razovsky, who is mentioned in the above letter.

The letter is located in “Aliens – Registration – Correspondence;”  General Jewish Council Records; I-170; Box 9, Folder 13; American Jewish Historical Society.

The new guide to the General Jewish Council Records is now online here, and the collection is open to researchers.