Portrait of American ambassador to Moscow, Laurence A. Steinhardt.
Overview
- Caption
- Portrait of American ambassador to Moscow, Laurence A. Steinhardt.
- Date
-
Circa 1940
- Locale
- United States
- Photo Credit
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park
Rights & Restrictions
- Photo Source
-
National Archives and Records Administration, College Park
Copyright: Public Domain - Published Source
- Flight and Rescue - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - p. 85
Keywords & Subjects
Administrative Notes
- Biography
- Laurence Adolf Steinhardt (1892-1950), American Jewish attorney and diplomat, who as ambassador to Turkey in 1944, worked with War Refugee Board representative, Ira Hirschmann, to facilitate the rescue of Jews from the Balkans and Hungary. Born and educated in New York City, Steinhardt was admitted to the bar in 1916. After serving in the U.S. Army in 1917, he became active for a time in the Federation of American Zionists and the American Zion Commonwealth. Steinhardt launched his legal career in the prestigious law firm of Guggenheimer, Untermyer and Marshall, where his uncle Samuel Untermyer was a partner. While practicing law there from 1920 through 1933, he also wrote articles on such topics as medical jurisprudence, labor unions, and economics. In 1932, Steinhardt worked on Franklin Roosevelt's presidential campaign and the following year the new president appointed him minister to Sweden. This marked the beginning of his diplomatic career. Following his four years in Sweden (1933-1937), Steinhardt served as ambassador to Peru (1937-1939), the Soviet Union (1939-1941), Turkey (1942-1945), Czechoslovakia (1945-1948) and Canada (1948-1950). During his tenure as ambassador to the Soviet Union, Steinhardt lent his influence to the enforcement of the stringent American restrictions on refugee entry which hindered Jewish immigration from eastern Europe to the United States. In a cable he sent from Moscow on October 6, 1940, he alerted Washington that 2000 Japanese transit visas had recently been issued in Kaunas for transit en route to Dutch possessions in the Americas with concern that the real intention of visa recipients was to enter the US and remain there for at least the duration of the war. Steinhardt's actions in this vein were exposed by journalist I.F. Stone in a 1943 article in PM magazine which received widespread attention in the Jewish press. However, as ambassador to Turkey in 1944, Steinhardt worked vigorously, in cooperation with Ira Hirschmann of the War Refugee Board, the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the American Joint Distribution Committee, to convince the Turkish government to permit entry and passage through Turkey for European Jewish refugees seeking to escape from the Balkans and Hungary to Palestine, thus saving the lives of thousands of Jews.
[Sources: Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews, Pantheon, New York, 1984, pp.217-240; Encyclopedia Judaica, 15:368]
- Record last modified:
- 2007-04-11 00:00:00
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1135012
