On this day in 1939, the Evian Conference began. For nine days, 32 countries’ representatives convened to address the Jewish refugee crisis. Country after country stood up and expressed their sympathy for the Jews, and then followed the sympathy with an excuse as to why they could not accept more Jewish refugees.The only country willing to accept Jews was the Dominican Republic. They offered to accept 50,000 to 100,000 refugees, which was accepted by the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) which contributed most of the funding to the Dominican Republic. Every Jew who arrived was given 80 acres of land, 10 cows, one mule, and one horse. Although plans were made to relocate Jews to the Caribbean nation, naval warfare in the Atlantic after the outbreak of the war made travel unfeasible. By October 1941, there were only 500 to 750 Jews in the Dominican Republic. Even though the government was willing to accept more Jews, Hitler ended Jewish emigration from Nazi territories, thus ending the relocation plan. Today, only around 25 Jewish families remain in the island nation. The Evian Conference drew public attention to the fact that most countries refused to take in Jewish refugees. America was unwilling to take in Jewish children, as seen by the rejection of the Wagner-Rogers Bill, which would have allowed in an extra 20,000 German children between the ages of two and 14. It was brought to Congress in February 1939 and was rejected in committee a couple of months later. Great Britain also had an opportunity to save Jews by allowing immigration into Mandatory Palestine; instead, in May 1939, the British government published the White Paper of 1939, which said there would be no independent Jewish state and restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine. This went against the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that previously stated that the British Mandatory Palestine would eventually become a Jewish homeland.