- Person
- Albert Einstein
- Lived
- 1879–1955
- Field
- Physics
- From
- German-American
The story
When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, Albert Einstein was visiting the United States. He knew he could not return. In February and March the Gestapo repeatedly raided his family's apartment in Berlin, and on landing in Belgium at the end of March he surrendered his German passport. In April the new government barred Jews from university posts, and thousands of scholars lost their jobs almost overnight. Einstein, whose works were burned by Nazi students that May, turned his fame toward helping others in danger, many of whom lacked his connections.
That year, at his suggestion, an American branch of the European-based International Relief Association was founded in New York to assist Germans suffering under Hitler's regime. Einstein was among those who joined it. Its work soon widened to include refugees from Mussolini's Italy and Franco's Spain.
In 1940, after the fall of France, European exiles and American liberals close to Eleanor Roosevelt formed the Emergency Rescue Committee to help refugees trapped in Vichy France. Its envoy Varian Fry arrived in Marseille within weeks and, with a small team, rescued more than 2,000 political, cultural, union and academic leaders in 13 months. In 1942 the two organisations joined forces as the International Relief and Rescue Committee, later shortened to the International Rescue Committee.
At the end of the Second World War the IRC set up emergency relief programmes, hospitals and children's centres in Europe and began resettling refugees. In the decades that followed it aided Hungarians fleeing in 1956, Cubans, Indochinese refugees, Afghans, Bosnians and Rwandans, and in recent years Syrians and Ukrainians, among many others.
The IRC still traces its history directly to that 1933 founding and names Einstein's role on its own history page. Today it provides emergency aid and long-term assistance to people uprooted by war, persecution or natural disaster in more than 40 countries, and helps refugees resettle in cities across the United States and Europe. In 2024 it reached 36.5 million people with humanitarian services.
Why it matters
The International Rescue Committee now helps tens of millions of people affected by conflict and disaster each year, more than ninety years after Einstein urged its creation.
About Albert Einstein
Theoretical physicist; relativity, the photoelectric effect, E=mc². Reshaped 20th-century physics and won the 1921 Nobel Prize.
More about Albert Einstein
- Einstein published four world-changing papers in 1905In 1905, while working as a patent clerk in Bern, Albert Einstein published four papers that transformed physics. Historians call it his miracle year.
- A 1919 eclipse confirmed Einstein's general relativityEinstein's 1915 theory of general relativity predicted that the sun bends starlight. Eclipse measurements in May 1919 matched his calculations and made him world famous.
- Einstein's photoelectric law, basis of modern light techIn 1905 Albert Einstein explained the photoelectric effect by proposing that light comes in packets of energy, work that won him the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- Einstein predicted a new state of matter in 1924Building on work by Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, Albert Einstein predicted in 1924 that atoms cooled near absolute zero would merge into one quantum state. It was created in 1995.
- Einstein predicted gravitational waves in 1916In 1916 Albert Einstein predicted ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves. LIGO detected them directly on 14 September 2015, nearly one hundred years later.
- Einstein's 1917 idea of stimulated emission led to the laserIn 1917 Albert Einstein introduced the concept of stimulated emission of light. Decades later it became the working principle of the maser and the laser.
- Einstein welcomed Marian Anderson into his home in 1937When a Princeton hotel refused a room to the Black contralto Marian Anderson in 1937, Albert Einstein invited her to stay at his house. She stayed with him on later visits.
- Einstein campaigned for Black civil rights in AmericaAlbert Einstein joined the NAACP, called racism America's worst disease, and in 1946 spoke at Lincoln University, a historically Black college that gave him an honorary degree.
- Einstein helped place German Jewish scientists in TurkeyIn September 1933 Albert Einstein wrote to Turkey’s prime minister asking him to employ German Jewish scientists dismissed by the Nazis. Hundreds of refugee scholars found posts in Turkey.
- Einstein helped raise funds to found the Hebrew UniversityIn 1921 Chaim Weizmann asked Albert Einstein to help raise money for a planned Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Einstein toured America for the cause, and the university opened in 1925.
Sources
- History of the International Rescue Committee International Rescue Committee
- Albert Einstein Wikipedia
- International Rescue Committee Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.