Becoming a Leader

Stephen Wise was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1874 and immigrated to New York as a young child. After graduating from Columbia University when he was 18, Wise traveled to Vienna, Austria, where he was ordained as a rabbi. He returned to the United States and, in 1899, moved to Portland, Oregon, to lead a congregation. Rabbi Wise soon became an advocate for progressive social causes. He promoted women’s suffrage, helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), fought against child labor, and advocated for workers’ rights.

A strong believer in participatory democracy, Wise helped found the American Jewish Congress, a nationwide organization of Jewish leaders established to “defend Jewish interests at home and abroad.” In 1936, he founded the World Jewish Congress (WJC), headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland; he served as the WJC’s president from the United States.

Protesting Nazism

In 1933, the American press reported extensively on both Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany and the Nazi regime’s persecution of German Jews. American Jewish leaders were conflicted about how best to respond. Some preferred working quietly behind the scenes to try to influence American leaders. They worried that public protest of Nazism might cause Hitler to retaliate against the Jewish community in Germany or that it would spark increased antisemitism in America. Others pressured US government officials to condemn the attacks. Stephen Wise and his followers organized multiple public protests against Nazism.

On March 27, 1933, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders, prominent politicians, and organized labor officials gave passionate speeches in front of a packed crowd at Madison Square Garden in New York City. During his address, Rabbi Wise pleaded for an immediate end to both the physical attacks and the discriminatory measures against German Jews. Similar anti-Nazi protests took place in more than 65 locations across the United States in the spring of 1933.

With the Nazi regime undeterred by these protests, Wise and the World Jewish Congress threw their support behind a movement organized by the Jewish War Veterans and Jewish Labor Committee to boycott German-made goods. Selling stickers and stamps to raise awareness, boycott advocates published lists of stores that sold German goods and urged Americans not to support these stores. The boycott lasted throughout the 1930s and angered Nazi officials, but it did not lead to a sustained, nationwide movement.

Wise and Roosevelt

Stephen Wise’s relationship with President Franklin Roosevelt was rocky at first. Wise did not vote for Roosevelt in 1932, preferring socialist candidate Norman Thomas. Yet Roosevelt, who once lamented that there was no “Jewish pope” to coordinate Jewish advocacy, recognized that Wise was an important—possibly the most important—American Jewish leader. Wise, in turn, was proud of his relationship with Roosevelt, whom he called “Chief.” Still, Wise was unable to persuade the Roosevelt administration to openly support unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine (which was controlled by Great Britain under a League of Nations mandate), or to push for a change in US immigration laws to allow more European Jews to flee to the United States from the dangers of Nazism.

The Riegner Telegram

On August 8, 1942, Gerhart Riegner, the World Jewish Congress’ representative in Switzerland, visited the US consulate in Geneva. He was, as a consular official described him, “in great agitation.” Riegner had just learned that Nazi Germany had initiated its mass murder campaign with the goal of murdering all of Europe’s Jews. He wanted to send this information through the State Department’s confidential channels to Stephen Wise.

When State Department officials in Washington, DC, received the message, they refused to forward it to Wise, arguing that Riegner’s information was likely “one of the many unreliable war rumors.” Although the State Department blocked this message, Riegner was able to relay it to a British WJC representative. Wise finally received the news in late August and asked Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to investigate and confirm the information.

On November 25, 1942, Welles called Wise to his office and explained that the evidence the State Department had gathered suggested that Riegner’s information was true. Nazi Germany and its collaborators were systematically murdering millions of Jews. Wise hastily called a press conference, and the next day, newspapers across the United States informed the public of the Nazi plan. Wise believed that two million Jews had already been murdered. The real number at that point in time was surely higher.

In early December, Wise and a group of rabbis presented Roosevelt with a long report detailing all the information they had gathered about the fate of Jews in various European countries. A few days after the meeting, the United States and eleven other Allied nations issued a “Declaration on Atrocities,” condemning Nazi Germany’s “bloody cruelties” and vowing to punish the perpetrators of these crimes after Allied victory. The declaration made no promise to rescue the victims of Nazi oppression.

Stephen Wise

Rabbi Stephen Wise was one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the twentieth century. His speeches, rallies, and protest efforts influenced thousands of Americans to boycott German goods and later to demand a US government response to the atrocities. When he died in 1949 at age 75, he was lauded by leaders of all religious denominations. A prominent Christian minister in New York City remembered Wise as “the conscience of this great city for more than a generation, and its noblest voice.”