“Our commitment must be to remember the victims who perished, respect the survivors still with us, and reaffirm humanity's common aspiration for mutual understanding and justice.”
-- Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust
AJR Honors Founder of Paralympic Games
10.09.2012
On the occasion of the Paralymic Games being held in London, the Association of Jewish Refugees honored the life of Paralympic Games founder Sir Ludwig Guttmann, who emigrated to England from Germany on the eve of World War II.
On 4 July 2012, a reception was held at the Attlee Room in the House of Lords to celebrate Sir Ludwig Guttmann, whose pioneering wartime work with victims of spinal injuries at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Aylesbury, revolutionized the treatment of members of the forces whose wounds would previously have left them bedridden and condemned to an early death.
Guttmann's methods were subsequently applied to paraplegics everywhere. Fittingly, the reception took place under the auspices of the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA), the successor organization to the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL), which was responsible in the 1930s for finding posts for a large number of refugee academics and scientists, mostly Jewish, who had been dismissed from their positions by the Nazis.
For more information on Sir Ludwig Guttmann, as well as the full article by Anthony Grenville, please visit the AJR's September 2012 Journal.