Forgotten female scientists who fled the Holocaust and came to America.

Neda Freebetti is an Italian mathematician and physicist who became a refugee during World War II. Fanny Shapiro came from Latvia, where she studied bacteriology until the war interrupted her research. Margaret Lviv, a French microbiologist, worked with her husband Andrei Lviv, although she didn't win the Nobel Prize with him. Elizabeth Rona was born in Hungary and became a famous nuclear chemist, but was forced to flee Hungary in 1940.

All four women have obtained doctorates in their respective fields, but as female scholars at this time, they are facing incredible challenges. They also face another obstacle, that is, they are the targets of anti-Semitic laws implemented in Europe in 1930s and 1940s. All four women applied for assistance from the American Emergency Committee, but none of them got assistance from the Committee to help displaced foreign scholars.

These are just four stories, sponsored by the rediscovery of refugees scholar program. The project was founded by researchers in the fields of journalism, Jewish studies, history and computer science at Northeastern University, aiming to clarify the worrying journey of scholars who fled persecution in Europe and wanted to go to the United States with the help of the emergency committee. Mitte was originally led by journalist Edward R. Murrow, acting as a middleman between American universities and European scholars looking for jobs outside their country of origin. It was funded by the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations and received applications from nearly 6,000 scholars. Among them, only 330 people received assistance. As for the 80 female scientists and mathematicians identified by the Northeast Group, only four have won the support of the Committee (although more people have gone to the United States and other safe havens).

This project was implemented in part because journalists and Professor laurel Loew had the following unanswered questions to study for her book, which was buried by Time magazine: The Holocaust and the most important newspaper in the United States. One of the questions is how the Jewish refugees went to the United States, and the archives of the Emergency Committee are the best resources to find the answer.

A team of eight researchers, together with colleagues and students, poured out of a large number of documents now stored in the New York Public Library with camera phones, took pictures of newspapers, and then tried to process information in a digital friendly format. In order to make this arduous task easier to manage, the researchers were limited to 80 female scientists and mathematicians, and put forward some ingenious solutions (including using latitude and longitude as geographical points to make online maps, because cities and countries have sometimes changed their names since World War II.

Ye Xiaokai said: "There is an extensive and commendable document that proves that the United States brought all these people here and played an extremely important role in saving Western civilization. "Of course, many people can change American culture by escaping (such as Albert Einstein and hannah arendt), but not everyone can. This is a complacent version of our history.

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1933 in April, the Nazi party passed the first major legislation restricting the rights of Jewish citizens. The Law on the Rehabilitation of Civil Servants excludes Jews and other non-Aryans from various occupations and organizations, including not being allowed to hold positions in universities. The new law also reduces the number of Jewish students and those who can pursue medicine or law.

Then there is the question of how the Nazis defined Judaism. For * * *, this is not a question of active worship. The most important thing is the purity of blood, which means that three or four grandparents were born in the Jewish religious community, which is enough for grandparents. He came to America and participated in the Manhattan Project.

Finally, Leif and the team at Northeastern University hope to digitize thousands of applications currently stored in physical copies. They hope that scholars in different fields can use this information, and occasionally the audience will visit the website of this project to see their stories.

For Green, he also thinks that knowing the details of these people in the massive holocaust data is another lesson. From this study, we can see the attitude of the United States towards refugees of that era. Green said: "One way to examine American history is to examine American ideals and reality." The 1930s was a period of crisis. People's fear of foreigners is everywhere because they are deeply involved in the Great Depression. In the United States, when you have such conditions, it is often more challenging to realize some of our established ideals and become an immigrant country or refuge.