7028 - Franklin D. Roosevelt Typed Letter Signed as President, Acknowledging Congressional Support for the Balfour Declaration Amid the Holocaust

Franklin D. Roosevelt Typed Letter Signed as President, Acknowledging Congressional Support for the Balfour Declaration Amid the Holocaust TLS as president, one page, 7 x 8.75, White House letterhead, December 29, 1942. Letter to the Hon. Robert F. Wagner, chairman of the American Palestine Committee, in full: "I appreciate your thoughtfulness in transmitting with your letter of December 4, 1942 a statement commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, signed by members of the Senate and of the House of Representatives." In fine condition. Accompanied by the original White House mailing envelope. Written in the midst of World War II, this letter reflects growing American political support for the Zionist movement at a moment of mounting catastrophe for European Jewry. The statement forwarded by Senator Robert F. Wagner, chairman of the American Palestine Committee, commemorated the 25th anniversary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration and was signed by 63 senators and 182 representatives, reaffirming support for a Jewish national home in Palestine while explicitly citing Nazi Germany’s campaign of extermination against the Jews: 'Faced as we are by the fact that the Nazi government, in its Jewish policy, is attempting to exterminate a whole people, we declare that, when the war is over, it shall be the common purpose of civilized mankind to right this cruel wrong insofar as may lie in our power, and, above all, to enable large numbers of the survivors to reconstruct their lives in Palestine where the Jewish people may once more assume a position of dignity and equality among the peoples of the earth.' Roosevelt’s acknowledgment thus connects the White House to an important wartime expression of congressional support for Zionism, several years before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.