When the Sternbuchs moved to Basel, Isaac's father became a community leader for newly arriving Orthodox, in a city where Jews were mostly assimilated and had even hosted the secular Theodor Herzl at the First Zionist Congress.
Unable to find a wife in the mostly assimilated Swiss-Jewish community, Isaac met Recha after he heard the daughter of a great Rabbi was seeking a marriage.
)[6] She and her husband had access to the Free Polish diplomatic pouch and were able to send coded cables to contacts in Va’ad Hatzalah (Rescue Committee) in the United States and Turkey.
One important use of this channel was the Sternbuchs alerting the New York branch of Va’ad Hatzalah, on 2 September 1942, to the horrors of the Holocaust, a message reinforcing the prior 8 August 1942 Gerhardt-Riegner cable.
Recha Sternbuch also developed good connections with the Papal Nuncio to Switzerland, Monsignor Phillippe Bernadini, dean of the Swiss diplomatic community.
He gave her access to Vatican couriers for sending money and messages to Jewish and resistance organizations in Nazi occupied Europe.
Recha Sternbuch was among the first to obtain South American identity papers, probably including many from El Salvador’s embassy in Switzerland provided by Jewish First Secretary George Mantello (born as Mandel György in Hungarian part of Romania) at his expense and distribute them to Jews whose life was endangered by the Nazis.
According to Holocaust historian Prof. David Kranzler Himmler was told that if the Jews in the camps were unharmed and released as the German army was withdrawing the allies would not shoot the guards, but would try them.