In the summer of 1933, the most famous scientist in the world had lost his home, his job and his country. His answer was not to retreat into his work, but to ask others to help the people who were still in danger.
A committee of 51
In July 1933, a group of 51 prominent Americans met in New York and agreed to form an American branch of the International Relief Association, a European aid group. According to the International Rescue Committee's own history, they did so at the suggestion of Albert Einstein. The group included the philosopher John Dewey, the novelist John Dos Passos and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and Eleanor Roosevelt joined the effort soon afterwards.
The new committee set up its office at 11 West 42nd Street, across from Bryant Park in Manhattan. Its purpose was simple and urgent: to help Germans who were being persecuted by the new Nazi government, and to guide people in immediate danger to safety in free countries.
A scientist who became a refugee
Einstein knew that danger personally. Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, and within two months the new regime had banned opposing parties, suspended civil liberties and begun pushing Jews out of government and the universities. As a German Jew, Einstein was barred from resuming his professorship at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. The Nazis raided his property and burned his books.
He arrived in the United States on October 17, 1933, and settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where he would spend the rest of his life. He did not stop at lending his name to the relief committee. The IRC records that Einstein and his wife filed visa applications for other German Jews and personally vouched for refugees trying to escape Nazi rule. For a man whose fame could open doors, using it to open doors for others became part of his life's work.
From relief to rescue
As the threat spread across Europe, so did the committee's work. It went on to help people fleeing Mussolini's Italy and Franco's Spain as well as Germany. In June 1940, after France fell, another group of Americans gathered at a fundraising lunch in New York and founded the Emergency Rescue Committee to help refugees trapped in the south of France. Many of the people they hoped to save were artists, intellectuals and opponents of the Nazis, both Jewish and non-Jewish.
That committee sent a young American journalist, Varian Fry, to Marseille in August 1940. Working by legal means where he could and quietly around the rules where he could not, Fry and his colleagues helped about 2,000 people escape in roughly 13 months, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. From an office he called the American Rescue Center, he arranged papers, visas and escape routes. Among those he helped were the painter Marc Chagall, the artist Max Ernst, the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska and the political thinker Hannah Arendt. French police finally arrested and expelled Fry in 1941, but the rescue work he had built carried on. In 1994, Yad Vashem recognised Fry as Righteous Among the Nations, the first American to receive that honour.
In 1942 the two American groups joined forces as the International Relief and Rescue Committee, a name later shortened to the International Rescue Committee, or IRC. When the war in Europe ended in 1945, IRC volunteers were among the first civilians to bring aid to Europe's displaced people.
“I felt obliged to help.”Varian Fry, Emergency Rescue Committee, Quoted by the International Rescue Committee
A promise kept for more than 90 years
The committee that Einstein helped inspire never closed its doors. Over the following decades it kept helping people forced from their homes by war, persecution and disaster. Leo Cherne, who joined its board in 1946, was elected chairman in 1951 and held the role for 40 years. Since 2013 the IRC has been led by its president and chief executive, David Miliband. Its headquarters remain in New York, the city where the 1933 committee first met.
Today the IRC describes its mission as helping to restore health, safety, education, economic wellbeing and power to people whose lives have been devastated by conflict and disaster. It works in more than 40 countries, and in about 30 cities across the United States it helps refugees rebuild their lives after they arrive.
Who it helps today
The scale of that work would have been hard to imagine in a small Manhattan office in 1933. In its 2025 annual report, the IRC says that in fiscal year 2025 it and its partners directly reached more than 20.5 million people. That year it supported 2,713 health facilities, provided more than 9.9 million outpatient consultations, admitted 723,350 people to life-saving nutrition programmes and directed cash assistance to more than 1.5 million people.
Behind each of those numbers is a person: a mother bringing a malnourished child to a clinic, a family using a cash grant to pay rent after fleeing their home, a refugee family stepping off a plane into a new city. In 2024 alone, the IRC resettled 16,692 people into new homes in the United States, a record for the organisation.
Why it still matters
The IRC grew from a moment when a Jewish refugee chose to look past his own loss and ask what could be done for others. That instinct, to turn personal hardship into protection for strangers, is the thread that runs from the committee of 1933 to the field teams of today.
More than nine decades on, the organisation that began with 51 volunteers and a famous scientist's request is still doing what its founders set out to do: helping people survive, recover and take back control of their futures. As long as people are forced to flee their homes, the idea Einstein helped set in motion will keep finding new ways to bring them to safety.
People in this story
Sources & further reading
- The IRC's history, International Rescue Committee
- Albert Einstein and the birth of the International Rescue Committee, International Rescue Committee
- Albert Einstein's legacy as a refugee, International Rescue Committee
- 2025 Annual Report, International Rescue Committee
- 2024 Annual Report, International Rescue Committee
- Varian Fry, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
- International Rescue Committee, Wikipedia
Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
Tikkun olam in action. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.
