Mass rally inside and outside Madison Square Garden against the Holocaust, July 31, 1944 |
I write from the encampment, where students and faculty gather in hopeful clusters and echoes of laughter cut through the night. (Harvard)About 70 tents are spread around U-Yard and H Street that range from single-person sleepers to 10-person tents. Around the encampment, people are sitting in circles, a pair played chess and another group watched a movie on a laptop. The sounds of quiet conversation and laughter traveled through the air. (GWU)The encampment had a wonderful environment with food, friends, and laughter. (MIT)Light chatter and frequent laughter echo across Cannon Green, where 40 protestors remain camped for the night. (Princeton)
Around 5:35 p.m., participants in the encampment opened a circle in the middle of South Lawn. A group of students danced an Indian folk dance with neon pink and yellow sticks. Onlookers cheered, clapped, and whistled in support of the dancers, with some shaking tambourines and playing drums. (Columbia)
The week of mourning for the Jewish victims massacred by the Nazis in occupied Europe concluded in Palestine last night with a huge demonstration in Tel Aviv culminating in a bonfire on Habimah Square at which a crowd of more than 100,000 persons burnt the Nazi swastika and an effigy of Hitler.In Jerusalem thousands of Jewish children marched to the Wailing Wall while their parents crowded the synagogues and rocited prayers for the Jews of Europe. Work stopped in all Jewish establishments except those engaged in manufacturing war materials. Black candles were lit in the old Bukharian synagogue, while aged Kabbalists gathered in their house of prayer in the old city and proclaimed anathemas upon Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler and other Nazi leaders.In Safed, Jews donned yellow Mogen Dovid badges. Jewish women in Safed and Tiberias marched in spontaneous demonstrations to holy graves there and lit candles on the tombstones. Similar mourning demonstrations are reported from all over the country.
December 1942, USA:
The Jewish Labor Committee today announced that it has decided to issue a call to all Jewish workers throughout the country except, those in factories engaged in war industry – to suspend work in order to demonstrate organized Jewish labor’s protest against the Nazi wholesale murder of Jews in Europe. An emergency meeting of the executive of the Jewish Labor Committee will be held on Tuesday to consider the latest reports of the Nazi massacres of Jews.
At a conference of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of America and Canada held in New York, it was decided to proclaim Wednesday, December 2, as a day of mourning in the United States, in accordance with a similar decision adopted by the Rabbinate in Palestine. The Union will issue an appeal to all Jewish enterprises throughout the country to join in the mourning by closing their businesses on Wednesday for a half-hour.
The members of the Workmen’s Circle, a Jewish labor fraternal organization, will gather simultaneously in 100 meeting places in Greater New York tomorrow to voice the protest of Jewish Labor against the Nazi butchery of Jews in Europe.The protest meetings which have been called jointly by the Workmen’s Circle and the Jewish Labor Committee will mark a “Day of Protest and Mourning” proclaimed by the national executive committee of the Workmen’s Circle in the name of its 75,000 members in the United States. Similar protest demonstrations will take place tomorrow throughout the country.
More than 75,000 Jews and Christians attempted to enter Madison Square Garden last night three hours before the opening of the demonstration against the Nazi extermination of Jews, the New York police authorities estimated today. In addition to the 20,000 who succeeded in entering, thousands stood outside the building listening to the speeches which were conveyed from the platform through loud speakers while tens of thousands of people at home heard the proceedings which were broadcast over a nation-wide hook-up.