[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 149 (Monday, November 18, 2002)]
[Senate]
[Page S11310]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[[Page S11310]]
THE SCHOLAR RESCUE FUND ALUMNI RESEARCH
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, next year I intend to speak more about the
Scholar Rescue Fund Alumni Research Program.
I am aware of this through my friendship with Dr. Henry Jarecki. I
believe that it is something more Senators should be aware of, and
something that would appeal to Senators in both parties. Perhaps one of
the best ways to describe it would be to include in the Record remarks,
by Dr. Jarecki, and I so ask unanimous consent to have those remarks
printed.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Allan Goodman has, in introducing me, spoken of the fact
that I accepted Henry Kaufman's mandate to help develop the
IIE's newly-established Scholar Rescue Fund. Doing what Henry
tells me to do is easy for me and this mandate was even
easier: I have been a refugee and I am an academic; and the
risks of free speech are tattooed on the skin of my relatives
and on my mind. I wanted to start immediately.
When I came to talk to Allan about the program, he was as
enthusiastic as I was but wondered whether we should wait
with the start until we had the endowment funds to make sure
that the program would last. His comments sounded so sensible
that I didn't at first know what to say. But that, as people
who know me, didn't last too long.
I told him how, in 1937, Franklin Roosevelt had convened a
conference of representatives from 80 countries in Evian,
France, to encourage them to accept Hitler's Jews, and how
speaker after speaker had praised President Roosevelt's
wonderful idea but said that, unfortunately, his particular
country could not take part at that moment because of a
unique problem they were having in his particular country
just at that particular time. Finally, the representative of
Rafael Trujillo, then known as the Butcher of Santo Domingo
for having machine-gunned hundreds of Haitian refugees who
tried to cross the border into the Dominican Republic, got up
to speak. Trujillo was, understandably enough, in bad odor
all over the world and so he tried to make amends by letting
his representative announce that Trujillo had agreed to let
100,000 of the refugees settle in the Dominican Republic.
The world's refugee organizations then set to work to make
sure that it all went well. They started by developing
precise criteria: how many merchants, how many farmers, and
what ages they should be; how many married and unmarried and
a lot more. By the middle of 1938 they had developed their
criteria and started to interview prospective candidates for
the trip. By that time, it was a lot easier to interview
candidates because many of them were already in concentration
camps. Over the next 9 months, these careful choosers found
900 who could go to the Dominican Republic, where most of
them settled in a small town called Sosua and survived the
war. Over 99,000 were left behind to die.
When I got through with my story, Allan told me to get on
with it and get on with it we have after I found generous
kindred spirits in my fellow Trustee Jeffrey Epstein and in
George Soros, both of whom I want not to thank in the name of
persecuted scholars in over 60 countries from whom we now
have requests for help. Sixty countries! What are they
thinking of? How can benighted tyrants and despots be smart
enough to know how powerful free-thinking scholars can be?
And how they must intimidate them into silence. ``They kill
your voice even before their kill you,'' said Maimul Khan, a
rescued scholar from Bangladesh who is here with us tonight.
I learned a lot from Allan's first reaction. It made me
understand how important it would be to find financial and
popular support for IIE programs that did not yet have
endowment or government backing. Back in the 30's when we
were raising money on our own, we made and carried out the
decision to bring European scholars to the States. We only
had enough money to bring out 300 of them but that was enough
to help found a graduate facility at the New School here in
New York.
This story from the thirties was just one of the many
stories I heard when I first joined the Board of IIE a few
years ago. I was impressed with the history of the Institute
which has undertaken hundreds of educational programs in its
80 years of existence, including the ``crown jewel'' of
such programs, the Fulbright Program that it has
administered on behalf of the Department of State since
that program's inception. With the help of its sponsors
and donors, the IIE has had an essential role in the
growth and development of hundreds of thousands of people
who are today leaders in every field of endeavor--be it
government, science, academe or business.
Just two weeks ago, three scientists were awarded the Nobel
Prize; two of them for their work on neutrinos, particles so
small that they are virtually impossible to detect. The one
from Japan and the one from Italy were Fulbrighters who
studied here in the Fifties. Last year, too, two Nobel Prize
winners for economics were Fulbrighters.
In your program this evening is a list of all of the
Fulbrighters and other IIE participants who, like our
founders Elihu Root and Nicholas Murray Butler, have been
awarded the Nobel Prize. It is an impressive roster of a
small subset of the IIE alumni network.
While I was learning about our history, I discovered that
my mentor and Chairman at Yale, the renowned psychiatrist
Fritz Redlich, had first visited the United States in 1930 on
an IIE program which brought him for a year from Vienna to
the University of Iowa. Fritz told me that in 1938, when he
recognized that he had to leave Vienna or go to a
concentration camp, his sponsor at Iowa was the only American
he knew who could provide him the ``affidavit'' required by
the U.S. government--the document that I and all other
refugees knew so well as committing the person who signed it
to not letting the recipient end up on welfare, a charge to
the state.
Fritz came here, became a professor at Yale, then head of
the Department of Psychiatry and eventually Dean of the Yale
Medical School. He was a brilliant and caring doctor who
wrote extensively on whether the poor got the same treatment,
or even the same diagnoses, as the rich. And he was, like me,
an iconoclast. It was he who brought me to Yale, a fact that
has had such a strong influence on my own life.
Fritz was, of course, not the only scholar who was rescued
from Hitler's Germany and the countries falling to Nazi
control. As I mentioned before, the Institute's ``University
in Exile'' program brought more scholars to America, enough
indeed to form the graduate faculty of the New School
University here in New York, a university which to this day
remains a vibrant academic institution.
The list of IIE alumni is not limited to scholars fleeing
persecution or Nobel Prize winners, however; it would fill a
``Who's Who'' of world leaders: Valery Giscard d'Estang,
former President of France; Margaret Thatcher, former Prime
Minister of England; 10 Heads of State, 56 Ambassadors, 44
Nobel Laureates, 115 University presidents, and 400,000 more
men and women who have been educationally enriched by the
experience we helped them to have.
The accomplishments of the IIE Alumni Network have indeed
been so illustrious that their stories seemed to me a natural
way to explain to the world just why international education
was so valuable and to obtain popular support for our
educational and humanitarian programs. To make sure that an
understanding of this network was available to us all, I
accepted Tom Russo's and Allan Goodman's challenge to
establish and codify an IIE Alumni database.
We will use this database to let the world know about the
kinds of people who have made good, in part because of the
programs designed and administered by the Institute. That
awareness will help us to develop support for additional
programs that are responsive to the needs of the current
moment--like the Scholar Rescue initiative I and others
have told you about.
I encouraged Dan Greespahn, who has done a terrific job
heading the Alumni Research Program, to find out as much a he
could about our alumni, both so that we could learn about
them and so that they could help us develop our new programs.
It was in the course of developing this Alumni Database that
we encountered Ruth Gruber, about whom you will hear more
momentarily.
And so there was a wonderful confluence of events: My
mentor and close friend, Fritz Redlich, who led Yale
University to the heights of scholarly achievement through
encouraging the free flow of ideas, and Ruth Gruber, an
outstanding humanitarian, journalist and author: both IIE
alumni--Fritz coming here and Ruth going there, both in 1930.
Henry Kaufman, on whose vision all of this rests, suggested
that we create an award to recognize some of the most
accomplished of those alumni. What better way to do so than
to name the award for someone who, for me at least, is the
paradigm of what IIE strive for--Fritz Redlich.
(Fritz, will you please stand and be recognized.)
Fritz, in appreciation of what you have meant to me and to
your thousands of students and in recognition of IIE's role
in ensuring your safety here in the United States, we want to
name our annual award the Fritz Redlich Alumni Award. Thank
you for letting us do so.
Tonight we present the first Fritz Redlich Alumni Award to
Ruth Gruber.
Our efforts to tell you about Ruth are made somewhat easier
by our friends in the film industry who, in 2001, made a CBS
television mini-series that detailed Ruth's rescue of 1000
refugees form Europe in 1944. In that film, the part of Ruth
Gruber was played by the highly accomplished actress Natasha
Richardson.
Ms. Richardson's performances on stage, screen and
televsion--both here and abroad--have been recognized by the
most prestigious awards in the entertainment industry. They
began in 1986 when she received the London Drama Critics's
Most Promising Newcomer Award. In 1992, she received the
London Drama Critics Best Actress Award. She received a Tony
for her performance as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, as well as
Outer Critics Circle, Drama League and Drama Desk Awards for
Best Actress. And there are many, many more.
Natasha Richardson is with us this evening to introduce
Ruth Gruber and to present her with the Fritz Redlich Alumni
Award. Let's start Natasha's introduction of Ruth by taking a
look at Natasha playing her in the film I told you about.
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