[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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