Australia: The Unpromised Land
Earlier this month, the story of a plan to settle 125,000 victims of the Holocaust in Australia was told during Holocaust Education Week in Toronto, Canada.
The story of Dr Isaac Steinberg has interesting twists and turns, as he valiantly faced many political, bureaucratic, and other challenges to bring his dream of saving thousands of Jews from a horrible fate in Germany and Eastern Europe, by acquiring land in the North Eastern part of Australia, an inhospitable, uninhabited land that he saw as an oasis of safety and a promise of prosperity.
A lecture was given with illustrative slides of the land deemed available and affordable, and which the Australian federal government and the provincial government were prepared to allocate for the settlement of up to 125,000 Jews. The land was studied and measured, funds were being collected, American Jewry was mostly on board with the plan, and it only needed one more level of approval, and then…. What happened?
The lecture was captured on YouTube.
I erred when issuing the press release. Please note the land being considered was in NW not NE and in Tasmania. Thanks for publishing the story. A. Spindel, Kulanu Canada