The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“THE SCHOLAR RESCUE FUND ALUMNI RESEARCH” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Senate section on pages S11310 on Nov. 18, 2002.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE SCHOLAR RESCUE FUND ALUMNI RESEARCH
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, next year I intend to speak more about the Scholar Rescue Fund Alumni Research Program.
I am aware of this through my friendship with Dr. Henry Jarecki. I believe that it is something more Senators should be aware of, and something that would appeal to Senators in both parties. Perhaps one of the best ways to describe it would be to include in the Record remarks, by Dr. Jarecki, and I so ask unanimous consent to have those remarks printed.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
Allan Goodman has, in introducing me, spoken of the fact that I accepted Henry Kaufman's mandate to help develop the IIE's newly-established Scholar Rescue Fund. Doing what Henry tells me to do is easy for me and this mandate was even easier: I have been a refugee and I am an academic; and the risks of free speech are tattooed on the skin of my relatives and on my mind. I wanted to start immediately.
When I came to talk to Allan about the program, he was as enthusiastic as I was but wondered whether we should wait with the start until we had the endowment funds to make sure that the program would last. His comments sounded so sensible that I didn't at first know what to say. But that, as people who know me, didn't last too long.
I told him how, in 1937, Franklin Roosevelt had convened a conference of representatives from 80 countries in Evian, France, to encourage them to accept Hitler's Jews, and how speaker after speaker had praised President Roosevelt's wonderful idea but said that, unfortunately, his particular country could not take part at that moment because of a unique problem they were having in his particular country just at that particular time. Finally, the representative of Rafael Trujillo, then known as the Butcher of Santo Domingo for having machine-gunned hundreds of Haitian refugees who tried to cross the border into the Dominican Republic, got up to speak. Trujillo was, understandably enough, in bad odor all over the world and so he tried to make amends by letting his representative announce that Trujillo had agreed to let 100,000 of the refugees settle in the Dominican Republic.
The world's refugee organizations then set to work to make sure that it all went well. They started by developing precise criteria: how many merchants, how many farmers, and what ages they should be; how many married and unmarried and a lot more. By the middle of 1938 they had developed their criteria and started to interview prospective candidates for the trip. By that time, it was a lot easier to interview candidates because many of them were already in concentration camps. Over the next 9 months, these careful choosers found 900 who could go to the Dominican Republic, where most of them settled in a small town called Sosua and survived the war. Over 99,000 were left behind to die.
When I got through with my story, Allan told me to get on with it and get on with it we have after I found generous kindred spirits in my fellow Trustee Jeffrey Epstein and in George Soros, both of whom I want not to thank in the name of persecuted scholars in over 60 countries from whom we now have requests for help. Sixty countries! What are they thinking of? How can benighted tyrants and despots be smart enough to know how powerful free-thinking scholars can be? And how they must intimidate them into silence. ``They kill your voice even before their kill you,'' said Maimul Khan, a rescued scholar from Bangladesh who is here with us tonight.
I learned a lot from Allan's first reaction. It made me understand how important it would be to find financial and popular support for IIE programs that did not yet have endowment or government backing. Back in the 30's when we were raising money on our own, we made and carried out the decision to bring European scholars to the States. We only had enough money to bring out 300 of them but that was enough to help found a graduate facility at the New School here in New York.
This story from the thirties was just one of the many stories I heard when I first joined the Board of IIE a few years ago. I was impressed with the history of the Institute which has undertaken hundreds of educational programs in its 80 years of existence, including the ``crown jewel'' of such programs, the Fulbright Program that it has administered on behalf of the Department of State since that program's inception. With the help of its sponsors and donors, the IIE has had an essential role in the growth and development of hundreds of thousands of people who are today leaders in every field of endeavor--be it government, science, academe or business.
Just two weeks ago, three scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize; two of them for their work on neutrinos, particles so small that they are virtually impossible to detect. The one from Japan and the one from Italy were Fulbrighters who studied here in the Fifties. Last year, too, two Nobel Prize winners for economics were Fulbrighters.
In your program this evening is a list of all of the Fulbrighters and other IIE participants who, like our founders Elihu Root and Nicholas Murray Butler, have been awarded the Nobel Prize. It is an impressive roster of a small subset of the IIE alumni network.
While I was learning about our history, I discovered that my mentor and Chairman at Yale, the renowned psychiatrist Fritz Redlich, had first visited the United States in 1930 on an IIE program which brought him for a year from Vienna to the University of Iowa. Fritz told me that in 1938, when he recognized that he had to leave Vienna or go to a concentration camp, his sponsor at Iowa was the only American he knew who could provide him the ``affidavit'' required by the U.S. government--the document that I and all other refugees knew so well as committing the person who signed it to not letting the recipient end up on welfare, a charge to the state.
Fritz came here, became a professor at Yale, then head of the Department of Psychiatry and eventually Dean of the Yale Medical School. He was a brilliant and caring doctor who wrote extensively on whether the poor got the same treatment, or even the same diagnoses, as the rich. And he was, like me, an iconoclast. It was he who brought me to Yale, a fact that has had such a strong influence on my own life.
Fritz was, of course, not the only scholar who was rescued from Hitler's Germany and the countries falling to Nazi control. As I mentioned before, the Institute's ``University in Exile'' program brought more scholars to America, enough indeed to form the graduate faculty of the New School University here in New York, a university which to this day remains a vibrant academic institution.
The list of IIE alumni is not limited to scholars fleeing persecution or Nobel Prize winners, however; it would fill a
``Who's Who'' of world leaders: Valery Giscard d'Estang, former President of France; Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of England; 10 Heads of State, 56 Ambassadors, 44 Nobel Laureates, 115 University presidents, and 400,000 more men and women who have been educationally enriched by the experience we helped them to have.
The accomplishments of the IIE Alumni Network have indeed been so illustrious that their stories seemed to me a natural way to explain to the world just why international education was so valuable and to obtain popular support for our educational and humanitarian programs. To make sure that an understanding of this network was available to us all, I accepted Tom Russo's and Allan Goodman's challenge to establish and codify an IIE Alumni database.
We will use this database to let the world know about the kinds of people who have made good, in part because of the programs designed and administered by the Institute. That awareness will help us to develop support for additional programs that are responsive to the needs of the current moment--like the Scholar Rescue initiative I and others have told you about.
I encouraged Dan Greespahn, who has done a terrific job heading the Alumni Research Program, to find out as much a he could about our alumni, both so that we could learn about them and so that they could help us develop our new programs. It was in the course of developing this Alumni Database that we encountered Ruth Gruber, about whom you will hear more momentarily.
And so there was a wonderful confluence of events: My mentor and close friend, Fritz Redlich, who led Yale University to the heights of scholarly achievement through encouraging the free flow of ideas, and Ruth Gruber, an outstanding humanitarian, journalist and author: both IIE alumni--Fritz coming here and Ruth going there, both in 1930.
Henry Kaufman, on whose vision all of this rests, suggested that we create an award to recognize some of the most accomplished of those alumni. What better way to do so than to name the award for someone who, for me at least, is the paradigm of what IIE strive for--Fritz Redlich.
(Fritz, will you please stand and be recognized.)
Fritz, in appreciation of what you have meant to me and to your thousands of students and in recognition of IIE's role in ensuring your safety here in the United States, we want to name our annual award the Fritz Redlich Alumni Award. Thank you for letting us do so.
Tonight we present the first Fritz Redlich Alumni Award to Ruth Gruber.
Our efforts to tell you about Ruth are made somewhat easier by our friends in the film industry who, in 2001, made a CBS television mini-series that detailed Ruth's rescue of 1000 refugees form Europe in 1944. In that film, the part of Ruth Gruber was played by the highly accomplished actress Natasha Richardson.
Ms. Richardson's performances on stage, screen and televsion--both here and abroad--have been recognized by the most prestigious awards in the entertainment industry. They began in 1986 when she received the London Drama Critics's Most Promising Newcomer Award. In 1992, she received the London Drama Critics Best Actress Award. She received a Tony for her performance as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, as well as Outer Critics Circle, Drama League and Drama Desk Awards for Best Actress. And there are many, many more.
Natasha Richardson is with us this evening to introduce Ruth Gruber and to present her with the Fritz Redlich Alumni Award. Let's start Natasha's introduction of Ruth by taking a look at Natasha playing her in the film I told you about.
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