Lilly Felddegen papers

Lilly Felddegen (1896-1996) helped secure visas to bring Jewish refugee children from Belgium to the United States during the Nazi years. Max Gottschalk, a prominent Jewish attorney and civic leader in Belgium, convinced a group of wealthy women to form a rescue committee, known as the Comité d'Assistance aux Enfants Refugiés Juifs (CAERJ), the Committee to rescue Jewish refugee children. This group of about ten to twelve dedicated women succeeded in persuading the Belgian government to grant asylum to some six hundred Jewish children until they could move on to other countries where they had relatives or where their parents might later find refuge. Mme. Marguerite Goldschmidt-Brodsky was the Committee President and her close collaborator and Comité Secretary was Mme. Lilly Felddegen, born in Switzerland and married to a prominent German born Belgian Jewish businessman. Mme. Lilly Felddegen from her HIAS office in New York began to contact every relative and friend in the United States of "her" Belgian children (now in France) to obtain affidavits of support and guarantees of ship passage payments. She then used these documents to harangue the State Department for the granting of individual immigration visas for the children to come to the United States. This collection contains primarily correspondence with some documents and pamphlets pertaining to Lily Felddegen’s rescue of the Belgian children of La Hille and efforts to bring them to the United States with the assistance of HIAS and several other wartime rescue organizations. Series 1, Refugee Project: general information, contains letters, newspaper clippings, and booklets requesting assistance for children in Belgium and the rest of Western Europe. Series 2, Refugee assistance: Names of Child Refugees and of Organizations Providing Assistance, contains files with the names of refugee children or of organizations, kept by Lily Felddegen which attempted to rescue children and bring them to the United States. The folders include correspondence about attempts to bring these children to the United States and information from relatives agreeing to sponsor them. Series 3, Family Correspondence, contains correspondence between Lily Felddegen and her niece and other correspondence addressed to Lily and Albert Felddegen. Series 4, Photographs, contains thirteen black and white photographs of a group of children from Tozer des Orphelins, Brussels, interned in Leyre, (the Garonne) and one unidentified black and white photograph, 1940 Oct.