Wilfrid Israel
[1] He was killed when his civilian passenger plane, en route from Lisbon to Bristol, was shot down by a Luftwaffe fighter patrol over the Bay of Biscay.
On 27 September 1931, Wilfrid Israel took his Indian guest V. A. Sundaram to meet his friend, Albert Einstein, at his summer home in the town of Caputh.
In 1932, Recha Freier, appealed to Wilfrid for financial aid to seed the beginning of her vision for Youth Aliyah to Palestine to save Jewish lives.
Pollack had contacts in the Gestapo; Wilfrid had money and direct links with sponsors abroad; Foley was the man in charge of issuing visas.
However, in the aftermath of the Kristallnacht pogrom, no Anglo-Jew was prepared to visit Germany, and the British government was initially dubious about the willingness of parents to part with their children.
[7][better source needed] Settling in London, he first worked with Bloomsbury House, the organization dealing with German Jewish refugees interned as 'enemy aliens'.
In 1941, he became research assistant on Germany to a Royal Institute of International Affairs committee based at Balliol College, Oxford, now working for the Foreign Office, and at the same time advised the Refugee Department of the F.O.
[citation needed] Contemporaries described him as an elegant, elusive figure most famously inspiring the character Bernhard Landauer in Christopher Isherwood's novel Goodbye to Berlin.
It was as the representative of German Jewry that Wilfrid Israel had described the details of Nazi persecution to British diplomats and government officials visiting Berlin, and also proposals for emigration to Britain.
Wilfrid Israel did indeed use his personal connections in Britain, most notably Lord Samuel (a previous Home Secretary) and at the time of the Kristallnacht the head of the Council for German Jewry- which had given assurances to the British government for support of Jewish refugees.
It was to this organization that Wilfrid Israel turned, again on behalf of German Jews as a whole, and contacted Samuel with the request for the rescue of unaccompanied Jewish children.
The second deputation included representatives of the British Quakers, who visited Germany and under Wilfrid Israel's guidance were able to confirm that Jewish parents were indeed willing to part with their children.
On Nov. 1st, Lord Herbert Samuel led an Anglo-Jewish deputation to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, asking for the British government to relax its stringent immigration laws to permit the entry of the children.
On the morning of Nov. 8th, when the Goebbels press campaign first became obvious, Wilfrid Israel, representing the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland, called on George Ogilvie-Forbes, the British Chargé d'Affaires in Berlin.
On Nov. 15th, Wilfrid cabled the Council for German Jewry with details of the problems facing the community, and proposed the immediate rescue of German-Jewish children and young people up to the age of seventeen.
An Anglo-Jewish deputation led by Lord Samuel, which included Chaim Weizmann, Lionel de Rothschild and the Chief Rabbi of the UK, Joseph Herman Hertz, hastily put together a petition based on the cable and went to see the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.
Together, Quakers and Jews visited the Jewish communities all over the country and reported back to the British Home Office (in charge of immigration to Britain).
Speaking in the House of Commons that evening, Hoare announced that the government had agreed to the admission of refugee children, quoting Greene's evidence.
Around this time, Wilfrid's previous and continued appeals were reinforced by the return to England of Sir Michael Bruce, who now impressed everyone in London with his first-hand information and knowledge.
After officially leaving Germany in mid-1939, Wilfrid Israel returned to Berlin to help Hannah Karminski and other members of the Frauenbund organize the last groups of German Jewish children of the Kindertransport.
The history of the Kindertransport, as presented in several accounts, omits the role played by German Jewish organizations and their leaders, most of whom remained in Germany to help their co-religionists despite the fact that they themselves had visas and were able to escape.
In conclusion, the idea of the Kindertransport did not originate with Anglo Jewry; their deputations were the response to an appeal made by Wilfrid Israel as representative of the Jewish community in Germany.
Before Israel left the peninsula, he had also formulated a plan to rescue Jewish children from Vichy France – an enterprise partially carried out after his death.
Israel was killed, aged 43, on 1 June 1943 when British Overseas Airways Corporation Flight 777 was shot down over the Bay of Biscay by eight German Junkers Ju 88s.
It tells the story of Wilfrid Israel's life-saving activities, his connections with the founders of Kibbutz HaZore'a and mostly focuses on the last ten years of his life.
