A resolution giving expression to the sentiment prevailing in certain quarters of Jewish workingmen in connection with Schwartzbard’s assassination of Petlura was adopted at a mass meeting called by the Jewish National Workers Alliance, with headquarters at 228 East Broadway, New York.
Seven hundred workers were present at the meeting at which the resolution, at the suggestion of Mr. Baruch Zuckerman, was adopted. The resolution read in part:
“Not desiring to anticipate the decision of the Paris court concerning the role of Petlura in the wholesale massacres in the Ukraine, we declare that we view Schwartzbard’s act as a protest against the fact that the entire world has passed over with silence our great and heartrending sorrow. His act is a challenge to the world to direct the attention and conscience of the world to the tens of thousands of wounds, through which we have bled and were bleeding up to today, and to the end that once and for all an impartial tribunal should issue for all generations to come, the verdict of the unheard of brutally inhuman crime which was committed by the champions of Ukrainian freedom against an innocent and helpless people.
“We declare before the entire world that we do not doubt the purity of Schwartzbard’s motive.”
The resolution further declares that “despite all the massacres that were committed on our innocent children, women and men by the ignorant, incited Ukrainian masses, we do not condemn the entire Ukrainian people. We refuse to harbor hatred against these people. We sympathize with their fight for the independence of their national existence. Deep in our hearts lives the hope for the day when the enlightened children of a renewed and independent Ukrainia will, by their own deeds, remove the blood stains by which their fathers and forefathers have besmirched the pages of the history of the Ukraine.
“At the same time we declare that those leaders of the Ukrainian people who directly organized and participated in the massacres, those under whose command the raging bands extinguished the lives of innocent tens of thousands of our people, violated thousands of our daughters and instilled a feeling of terror and panic in the souls of the three million of our brethren, those we hold responsible for the greatest wholesale crimes in the history of mankind.
“We will call them to the judgment of world history.”
Among the speakers were Moses Katz, at one time representative of the Joint Distribution Committee in the Ukraine, who declared he had met Schwartzbard personally; Jacob Rachlis and Solomon Y. Jacobi organizers of the Jewish Self-Defense body in the Ukraine; Dr. A. Moukdoni and Joseph Barondess. Two hundred dollars were subscribed at the meeting for the Schwartzbard Defense Fund.
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.
