[The purpose of the Digest is informative: Preference is given to papers not generally accessible to our readers. Quotation does not indicate approval.–Editor.]
A Jewish national loan under the auspices of the League of Nations, similar to the Greek and Bulgarian repatriation loans, to be used for settling in Palestine the thousands of Jewish refugees who are still scattered in various parts of the world as well as Jewish emigrants from Poland and other countries, is the plan urged by M. Frostig, Polish Jewish leader and member of the Sejm.
Presenting his views in “Dos Yiddishe Folk” (Nov. 5) of New York, Deputy Frostig outlines the successful activities of the Greek repatriation loan, of which Henry Morgenthau was the head:
“In the first eighteen months of its activities the Autonomous Commission in charge of Greek repatriation colonized 70,000 families, and if we assume that each family consisted of five members it means that in a period of about a year and a half 350,000 homeless Greeks were settled in their own country. If we compare these figures with the number of people whom we desire and must colonize in Palestine, we can see how much can be accomplished in the field of mass colonization if only we had the necessary financial means. In a brief period the Autonomous Commission erected 35,000 houses and supplied the colonists with 130,000 heads of cattle, besides furnishing them with tools, seeds, etc. The re-emigration process of the Greeks from Minor Asia was carried out in the best order; Greece began to prosper economically thanks to the new human material and working capital and the $50,000,000 which had been borrowed for this purpose became a blessing for the country and for the Greek nation.
“What was possible for Greece and Bulgaria must be, and is in our opinion, possible for the Jewish people. We Jews too, have our hundreds of thousands homeless families who are scattered in nearly all European countries. In Poland, France, Germany and Belgium, there are tens of thousands of Jewish families that have no citizen rights in these lands and are being tolerated merely as ‘homeless ones.’ They are constantly threatened with expulsion and new wanderings because they are in fact citizens of no country, their citizenship not being recognized by any government and living on the basis of the well known Nansen passports.
“Tens of thousands of other Jewish families must emigrate from Russia and especially from Poland where the conomic ground is being taken more and more from under their feet. We Jews were always a people of wanderers and the World War completely shattered our former possibilities for existence in the East European countries. We are forced to wander to escape and we have no where to go except Palestine.
“What Greece and Bulgaria — after all but two small and weak Balkan countries — were able to accomplish should also be possible for the 15,000,000 Jews of the world. And what the world regarded as necessary because of social and humanitarian reasons to do for Greece and Bulgaria, it should also do for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees, who are homeless, hounded, in despair, a great misfortune to the Jewish people and a social menace to the European countries.”
THE JEWS IN CANADA AND QUEEN MARIE
Resentment at the participation of Canadian Jews in the reception to Queen Marie is voiced by the “Canadian Jewish Review,” of Toronto. In an editorial of Nov. 5, under the head “Poor Shtadlonim” (self-appointed representatives), the paper contrasts the behavior of the Jews with that of the Ukrainians in Canada whose delegation to the Queen protested against the treatment of their brethren in Roumania. The paper writes:
“It was surprising — and indeed mortifying — to hear that some of our Jewish citizens had so little self-respect as to go cringing before the Queen, and offer their unwelcome homage. The heading in the press read that ‘members of the Roumanian colony’ appeared to welcome their Queen. If such was the case we should not be concerned. But the names and the accompanying photographs revealed what the initiated might have expected: the ‘Roumanian colony’ were Jews. And they were Zionists at that!
“Roumania has treated her Jewish population more atrociously than even Russia of the Czars. And at the very moment when the local Jewish citizens were smiling their hypocritical smiles at the Queen, Jews in Roumania were being subjected to the most inhuman cruelties.
“A delegation of Ukrainians appeared before the Queen too. They were not Jews. Their brethren were being oppressed in Roumania. The Ukrainians did not fawn. They did not bear flowers. They did not prattle prayers. They spoke up like men. They reminded the Queen that Ukrainian men and women were being treated inhumanly in her land where she is Queen. They asked her to exercise whatever influence she may have to change the condition of the Ukrainians.
“A Jewish rabbi desecrates the holy tongue when he reads adulatory addresses to the representative of a land which humiliates and grinds down his own brothers. The Jewish girls who knelt with their floral offerings before Queen Marie were degrading the Jewish sense of self-respect. The Queen must have looked at them and thought: ‘What? Some more Jews! I hate them in Roumania. What do they want of me here?'”
Samuel Bakal of New York City died on Monday. Mr. Bakal was first Vice President of the Hebrew National Orphan Home.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
