75 years ago: Eleanor Roosevelt urges the world to allow Jews in Palestine to get arms

From The Palestine Post, February 20, 1948:

From JTA, February 19, 1948:

New York City’s effort on behalf of the $250,000,000 national United Jewish Appeal campaign was launched today by 2,500 community leaders at the annual Women’s Division rally held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Speakers included Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, former Governor Herbert H. Lehman, Max Lerner, and Mrs. Jerome I. Udell, chairman of the Women’s Division in the 1948 campaign.

Mrs. Roosevelt, a member of the American delegation to the United Nations, told the gathering that “we must ask our government to allow the importation of arms into Palestine and to raise its embargo.” The added that “the Arab leaders have done themselves a great harm in saying that they would fight a decision of the United Nations.”

I cannot find the transcript of her speech to the United Jewish Appeal. However, she also spoke there in 1946, where she described the conditions of Jews in the displaced persons camps of Europe, and said:

On the day that I was in the Jewish camp, the main meal was some powdered eggs—scrambled eggs. The people have such a longing to create a sense of home that they would take the powdered eggs from the kitchen and take them back to the one little room that they might have.

You feel a kind of desperation about the dignity of the individual, the right to some privacy. They have done such pathetic things. The remnants of the families try so hard to make a home. I looked at these powdered eggs that were going to be carried back, and I thought, "Oh, Heavens, how horrible—the eggs will be cold when they get them back to their rooms." And yet, they would take them back, simply because—even though you ate and you slept and you sat in the same little place—that little place was home.

There is a building in this camp where children are kept who have wandered in off the road and have no older people with them. One little boy sang for me; he sang a Jewish song. Of course, these children are much smaller than they should be for their age. This little, tiny, curly-haired thing was ten years old, but he didn't look much more than six or seven. The director told me that this little boy had just wandered in with a younger brother one day, and they had been at the camp ever since. He said that this little boy always sang for them. They called him their "singer" in the camp. But he had all the appearance of a worried, old man, because the care of his younger brother and himself weighed on his shoulders.

What those children have gone through is just indescribable.

There was one old woman there whom I don't think I will ever forget, because you looked at her and you felt that this was the end of life, and that life must have been so terrible to bring one at the end to what this poor old thing faced.

It is true they want to go back to Palestine. They want to go back because that represents to them some roots.

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