They Could Have Been Saved

May 13, 2026 by Susan Rosenbluth

By Rafael Medoff

One hundred years ago this week, the US government agreed to a new immigration procedure: the wives and unmarried children of clergymen and professors would be allowed to enter together with them, outside the restrictive quota system. The new policy could have later saved many Jews from the Holocaust. So why didn’t it?

The May 1926 decision by the Coolidge administration was in response to a Supreme Court ruling. What happened is that the 1921 immigration law—creating the quota system—permitted “ministers of any religious denomination” and “professors for colleges” to enter the US outside the new quotas. The US government initially blocked their spouses and children from joining them, but the Supreme Court decision overruled that.

That was the immigration system that Franklin D. Roosevelt inherited when he became president. So when the Nazis rose to power in Germany in 1933, and large numbers of rabbis and Jewish professors wanted to escape, US law made it possible to welcome them and their families—but only in theory. In practice, FDR didn’t want any significant number of rabbis and Jewish professors coming in, much less their wives and children.

Throughout the twelve years of the Roosevelt administration, only several hundred rabbis were permitted to enter the US outside the quotas.

As for Jewish professors, Roosevelt administration officials looked high and low for reasons to keep them out, as Hebrew Union College (in Cincinnati) discovered when it tried to bring European Jewish scholars to join its faculty in the 1930s. One distinguished German Jewish scholar whom the college invited was disqualified on the grounds that he was primarily a librarian rather than a full-­time professor.

The Roosevelt administration also accepted the Nazi regime’s downgrading of the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies, the Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums, from “Hochshule” (an institute of higher learning, or college) to “Lehranstalt” (a lower-­level institution of learning, or an academy). Once that institution was no longer considered to be at the university level, its faculty members were no longer eligible for non-­quota visas to America.

In effect, the Roosevelt administration accepted the validity of an antisemitic decree by the Nazis, thus preventing some Jewish scholars from qualifying to enter the United States.

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Dr. Rafael Medoff is the founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust.