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Europe's Desperate Jewish Academics in the Holocaust
(Ha'aretz) Laurel Leff - After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, biologist Leonore Brecher was fired from her position at Vienna's famed Institute for Experimental Biology along with 15 other Jewish employees, who made up half the staff. Brecher knew her only hope was to immigrate. U.S. immigration law provided non-quota visas to professors at institutions of higher learning abroad who had a job offer from an American university. She and thousands of other desperate Jewish scholars contacted American universities and some made offers to refugee scholars, but many more did not. Only 944 professors from Europe received non-quota visas between 1933 and 1941. On Sep. 14, 1942, Brecher boarded a train in Vienna along with about 1,000 other Jews, arriving at Maly Trostinec, an extermination camp in Belarus on the outskirts of Minsk. The Jews were herded immediately to open pits in the nearby forest and shot. Only 17 Viennese Jews are known to have survived the camp. The writer is Associate Director of Jewish Studies at Northeastern University in Boston and the author of Well Worth Saving: American Universities' Life-and-Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe (2019).