Exit from Yad Vashem Photo: James Emery/flickr CC:BY
Quaker rescues recorded
Recognition of Quaker work in second world war
Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem and a British university are to give an historic recognition to British Quakers who saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. The initiative is the culmination of an eight-year campaign by Peter Kurer, a seventy-nine-year-old Austrian-born Jewish refugee from Manchester, who has been struggling for some years to convince Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem, to recognise the rescue.
He told the Friend: ‘My family was saved by British Quakers. My father was training to be a dentist in Vienna when he decided to flee from Nazi persecution in 1938. He had contact with a British Quaker couple in Manchester, the Goodwins, who “guaranteed” nine members of my family. The British government insisted that any Jews coming in to Britain had to be “guaranteed” and not be a financial burden on the state.’
Peter added: ‘When I was visiting my son in Israel in 2002 I went to Yad Vashem and was interested to see how they had remembered the contribution made by British Quakers. There were only a couple of small references. I was rather shocked and decided to do something about it and ensure that the museum did recognise this extraordinary generosity and kindness.’
Members of the Religious Society of Friends paid an estimated £350,000 (£17.5m at today’s rates) in guarantees to the British government to accept around 6,000 Jews into the UK. Quakers then housed and found jobs for them, including Peter Kurer and eight of his family members evacuated from Vienna in 1938.
The episode has never been fully documented by historians, but Peter Kurer spent almost a decade collating survivors’ stories into an academic paper supported by five British historians. In a statement, Yad Vashem says the paper will join 130 million pages of historical documents in its library, where it will be catalogued and made available to researchers. The campaign has also prompted the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at Sussex University to conduct a study of the rescue effort.
