Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, president of the Zionist Organization of America, today condemned Director General of UNRRA Herbert Lehman’s reinstatement of Lt. Gen. Frederick Morgan as a “lamentable act of whitewashing.”
“The action of Mr. Herbert Lehman in restoring Lt. General Morgan to his post as Chief of Operations in Germany for UNRRA is a lamentable act of whitewashing of a British official whose own words condemned him as hopelessly unfit to occupy any office where truth and humanity are primary requisites,” Dr. Silver stated.
Declaring that the reason for reversing UNRRA’s ousting of Morgan remains a “mystery,” he said “certainly Morgan’s disingenuous letter of explanation could not have caused the change in heart. Morgan does not deny that he uttered those unconscionable and irresponsible statements which accused Jewish refugees, the survivors of Nazi horror, moving out of Poland in order to find greater security elsewhere, of being agents in some secret plot of world Jewry, and that in them ‘we have the seeds of World War III.’ Mr. Morgan lent himself to a British political maneuver to discredit the insistent and desperate clamor of the Jews of Europe to be permitted to go to Palestine,” Rabbi Silver added, accusing Morgan of serving “British imperialism.”
Morgan’s reinstatement also drew criticism from Dr. Joseph Tenenbaum president of the American and World Federation of Polish Jews, who charged that Gen. Morgan’s statement to Lehman was a “deliberate sidetracking” of the main issue in the demand for Morgan’s dismissal.
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