Magnes had been suffering from increasingly-poor health in 1948, and was already seriously ill when he left Palestine in April. On June 10, he suffered a stroke and had to be hospitalized for several weeks. Magnes died in New York of a heart attack on October 27, 1948, at the age of 71. Just before his death, he withdrew from the leadership of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a welfare organization he had helped establish. The reason was that the AJJDC had not answered his plea for help for the Palestinian refugees: "How can I continue to be officially associated with an aid organization which apparently so easily can ignore such a huge and acute refugee problem?"