The reports about growing anti-Semitism in Germany are greatly exaggerated, declared Dr. Leo Baeck, president of the German Rabbinical Assembly and a Non-Zionist member of the Administrative Committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, in as interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on his arrival in New York yesterday. Dr Baeck, who is the president of the Grand Lodge of the German B’nai B’rith, is here for the quinqennial B’nai B’rith convention in Cincinnati, where he will discuss the situation of the Jews in Germany.
“It is true that the anti-Semitic National Socialist party is growing in power in Germany,” said Dr. Baeck. “But there is no immediate danger,” he said, “for the Jews. Just as the Ku Klux Klan in the United States does not endanger the individual Jew here, so the National Socialists in Germany do not constitute a menace to individual German-Jews. All their attempts in the Reichstag to obtain anti-Semitic legislation have been in vain.”
He pointed out, however, that “there is a philosophical and economical anti-Semitism problem in Germany and as a result of that the Jews meet with difficulties in being employed in the large industrial enterprises.”
Dr. Baeck declared, too, that the number of Jews from Eastern Europe living in Germany is diminishing, due to the fact that economic conditions in Germany are bad. Many of them therefore emigrate to France, he said, while few Jews from Eastern Europe are now coming to Germany.
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.
