Bloom, Sol, 1870-1949

Sol Bloom (March 9, 1870 – March 7, 1949) was an American song-writer and politician from New York City who began his career as an entertainment impresario and sheet music publisher in Chicago. He served fourteen terms in the United States House of Representatives from the West Side of Manhattan, from 1923 until his death in 1949. Bloom was the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee from 1939 to 1947 and again in 1949, during a critical period of American foreign policy. In the run-up to World War II, he took charge of high-priority foreign-policy legislation for the Roosevelt Administration, including authorization for Lend Lease in 1940. He oversaw Congressional approval of the United Nations and of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) which worked to assist millions of displaced people in Europe. He was a member of the American delegation at the creation of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 and at the Rio Conference of 1947. In coordination with America's mainstream Jewish leadership and organizations Bloom opposed the Hillel Kook led Emergency Committee for the Rescue of European Jewry (aka Bergson Group). In Fall 1943 he initiated a Congressional hearing investigating Kook and his group's actions. Right before Yom Kippur 1943 Bloom tried to dissuade a group of about 400 Orthodox rabbis from marching to Washington and try to appeal to President Franklin D Roosevelt asking that America help in some meaningful manner to save remnants of the abandoned Jews of Europe. He felt that the rabbis looked too un-American and thought their march would be an unseemly spectacle. The rabbis did go to Washington on the famous "Rabbis' March" together with Hillel Kook and Roosevelt didn't meet with them. Bloom adopted the mainstream Zionist position that the only way to save the doomed Jews of Europe was for Britain to open the gates to Mandatory Palestine, which Britain was unwilling to do. He urgently lobbied President Harry Truman in 1948 to immediately recognize the Jewish state of Israel, which Truman did. When the Republicans took control of the Foreign Affairs Committee after the 1946 election, Bloom worked closely with the new chairman, Charles Eaton. They secured approval for the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.