Relief Work In The Near East

President Woodrow Wilson urges $30 Million campaign for Armenian and Near East relief efforts to be collected nationwide January 12-19th in this 1/7/1919 dispatch in North Carolina’s “Salisbury Evening Post.”#genocidediary #ArmenianGenocide. The full text of Wilson’s proclamation below:

“For more than 3 years, American philanthropy has been a large factor in keeping alive Armenian, Syrian, Greek and other exiles and refugees of Western Asia.

On two former occasions, I have appealed to the American people in behalf of these homeless sufferers, whom the vicissitudes of war and massacre had brought to the extermest need.

The response has been generous, but now the period of rehabilitation is at hand. Vastly larger sums will be required to restore these once prosperous but now impoverished refugees to thir former homes than were required merely to sustain life in their desert exile.

It is estimated that about 1,000,000 Armenian, Syrian, Greek and other war sufferers in the Near East will require outside help to sustain them through winter. Many of them are now hundreds of miles from their homeland. The vast majority of them are helpless women and children, including 400,000 orphans.

The American Committee for relief in the Near East is appealing for a minimum of $30,000 to be subscribed from January 12-19, 1919, with which to meet the urgent needs of these people.

I, therefore, again call upon the people of the United States to make even more generous contributions than they have made heretofore to sustain through the winter months those, who, through no fault of their own, have been left starving, shelterless condition, and to help reestablish these ancient and sorely oppressed people in their former homes on a self-supporting basis.”

WOODROW WILSON