Unearthed Letter From Einstein Thanked American Who Helped Jews Flee Nazis
Image by Getty Images
Nearly 80 years after it was penned, a letter written by Albert Einstein thanking an American Jew for his efforts to rescue Jews from Nazi Germany has been revealed.
Einstein sent the note to New York financier David Finck on June 10, 1939. The two men never met, but Finck attracted Einstein’s attention after he sponsored some members of the Jewish community so they could flee Hitler’s regime and take refuge in the United States.
“May I offer my sincere congratulations to you on the splendid work you have undertaken on behalf of the refugees,” Einstein wrote in the letter. “The power of resistance which has enabled the Jewish people to survive for thousands of years has been based to a large extent on traditions of mutual helpfulness.”
Finck’s daughter Enid Bronstein, who lives in Chicago, has been keeping the letter in a safety deposit box since it was given to her 50 years ago following her father’s death.
“I wanted to keep the letter to show it to my children and grandchildren so that they would get the message that very contribution, no matter how small, is important,” she told Chicago’s WGN TV.
The letter will be donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC so that it can be seen by more people.
Contact Haley Cohen at hcohen@forward.com
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
