Jabotinsky letter revealing plea for funds to save European Jews heads to auction

Revisionist Zionism founder’s missive to finance director warned movement’s ‘success or failure’ hinged on new funding system

By ToI Staff 23 February 2026, 5:02 pm

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Images of Ze’ev Jabotinsky's 1938 letter. (Nate D. Sanders Auctions)

A letter signed by Revisionist Zionism founder Ze’ev Jabotinsky as he raced to fund a mass evacuation of European Jews in the shadow of the coming Holocaust will be auctioned online on Thursday, American auction house Nate D. Sanders announced on Monday.

The Yiddish-German letter — penned just weeks before Nazi Germany annexed Austria — was intended to address funding for Jabotinsky’s evacuation plan for Jews before Nazi occupation, militia operations, and diplomatic campaigns.

At the time the letter was written in early 1938, Jabotinsky was advocating for a plan to resettle 1.5 million European Jews illegally in the British Mandate for Palestine over the course of a decade. This plan was fiercely rejected by Jewish and other Zionist groups for fear that it would exacerbate antisemitism in European countries, already reeling from the rise of Nazism.

Simultaneously, Jabotinsky was working to fund his Irgun paramilitary organization’s escalating activities, which he directed from his base in London, as British authorities had barred him from returning to Palestine.

The letter shows Jabotinsky urging the acting director of his movement’s finance department to establish a mandatory taxation system for all national offices, warning that the organization’s “success or failure” depended on it.

He wrote that any office that doesn’t participate in the “voluntary self-taxation” should be excluded from the movement and be “without leadership.”

Ze’ev Jabotinsky (seated, center, pictured here with members of his right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement Betar) as the forebearer of today’s hard-line Zionism. (Wikimedia commons)

Jabotinsky also references the World Conference of the New Zionist Organization, which had broken from the World Zionist Organization in 1935, in Prague. The World Conference convened from January 31 to February 7, 1938, during which Jabotinsky’s evacuation plan was formally adopted, although it would never come to pass.

Nazi Germany annexed Austria mere weeks after the conference closed, bringing 190,000 Jews under Nazi rule.

Bidding on the letter starts at $10,000.

Revisionist Zionism, established by Jabotinsky in 1925, rejected the mainstream Zionist movement’s moderate, socialist approach to Israel’s statehood, advocating for the immediate creation of a Jewish state defended by its own military. It is the ideological antecedent to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party.