History lessons

In “The conference that paved the way to the murder of millions” (August 9), Ervin Birnbaum was succinct, clear and powerful. The Evian Conference in July 1938 paved the way for the Holocaust

However, 18 years earlier, in April 1920, the San Remo Conference of The Principal Allied Powers, in the opinion of Louis Brandeis, who was appointed to the United States Supreme Court four years earlier in June 1916, established the foundation of the Jewish legal rights and title to sovereignty over Palestine.

Louis Brandeis realized that the political and “legal battles” and the central goal of Herzlian Zionism had been won and the time was ripe to take practical measures to establish the Jewish homeland. He saw no need for more political action to secure over again what had already been secured by the extraordinary efforts of Haim Weizmann others including himself.

He clashed with Weizmann and his supporters, who wanted the Zionist movement to continue unabated its political work as if the San Remo Resolution, the crowning achievement of prestate Zionism, never existed.

When Weizmann’s view gained the upper hand in 1921, Brandeis withdrew from the ranks of leadership of both American and world Zionism and two decades later the Holocaust consumed six million Jews.

JACK SHEBSON Jerusalem

Regarding “Swiss tourism official complains over behavior of ‘Jewish guests,’” (August 9), the headline, regardless of the subject at hand, brought to mind the fact that in the 1930s Switzerland that requested that Nazi Germany insert the letter “J” on the passports of German Jews to identify applying immigrants as Jews.

MARION REISS

Beit Shemesh