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Yitzchak (aka Yitzhok) Sternbuch, Recha Sternbuch's husband, moved to Switzerland when he was 10 years old with his family from the United States. The Sternbuchs had moved to the US after the Kishinev pogrom but had found life in New York City difficult as newly arrived immigrants. When the Sternbuchs moved to Basel, Isaac's father became a community leader for newly arriving Orthodox, in a city where Jews were mostly assimilated and had even hosted the secular Theodor Herzl at the First Zionist Congress. In this aspect, Isaac's childhood in Switzerland shared similarity with Recha's in Belgium, as his home became a meeting point for religious men and scholars to meet with his father. In fact, Abraham Isaac Kook, one of the founders of religious Zionism, was staying with the Sternbuchs in 1914 when World War I started, an experience which likely influenced the Sternbuch family's views on Zionism. Unable to find a wife in the mostly assimilated Swiss-Jewish community, Isaac met Recha after he heard the daughter of a great Rabbi was seeking a marriage^[1]

She was an Orthodox woman who saved large number of Jews during the Holocaust and helped many impoverished Jews in Poland after the war.

Yitzchak and Recha had access to the Free Polish diplomatic pouch and were able to send coded cables to contacts in Vaad Hatzalah(Rescue Committee) in the United States and Turkey. One important use of this channel was the "Sternbuch Cable" with Yitzchak alerting the New York branch of Va’ad Hatzalah rescue committee in America, on 2 September 1942, to the horrors of the Holocaust, a message reinforcing the prior 8 August 1942 Gerhardt-Riegner cable. It was sent to alert American Jewry to the reality of the Holocaust and led to a meeting of 34 Jewish organizations. The Polish diplomatic pouch was also used to send secret messages, money to Jews in Nazi occupied Europe and as bribes for rescue.

Recha Sternbuch also developed good connections with the Papal Nuncio to Switzerland, Monsignor Phillippe Bernadini, dean of the Swiss diplomatic community. He gave her access to Vatican couriers for sending money and messages to Jewish and resistance organizations in Nazi occupied Europe. Recha Sternbuch was among the first to obtain South American identity papers, probably including many from El Salvador’s embassy in Switzerland provided by Jewish First Secretary George Mantello (born as Mandel György in Hungarian part of Romania) at his expense and distribute them to Jews whose life was endangered by the Nazis.

In September 1944 Recha made contact with Jean Marie Musy, former Swiss president and an acquaintance of Himmler. At Recha Sternbuch’s request Musy, with help from his racing driver son Benoît Musy, drove to Berlin at risk to their lives while the roads were bombed by the allies to negotiate with Himmler, who was willing to release Jews then in concentration camps. According to some he demanded for ransom of one million dollars of that time. According to Holocaust historian Prof. David Kranzler Himmler was told that if the Jews in the camps were unharmed and released as the German army was withdrawing the allies would not shoot the guards, but would try them. On 7 February 1945 Musy delivered the first 1,210 inmates from Theresienstadt and more were promised at two week intervals. Unfortunately this initiative too was apparently obstructed by a Jewish leader in Switzerland. ^[2]

The Sternbuchs kept negotiating through Musy to the end of the war. There was an agreement to turn over four concentration camps essentially intact to the Allies in return for a USA guarantee to try the camp guards in court as opposed to shooting them on the spot. This saved the lives of large numbers of camp inmates. The Sternbuchs also negotiated the release of thousands of women from the Ravensbrück camp, the release of 15,000 Jews held in Austria, and negotiated with the Nazis. As a result hundreds of Jews from the so-called "Kasztner Train" who had been held for ransom in Bergen-Belsen were released.