Roumania Tells Joint Foreign Committee Anti-semitic Trouble Work of Few Individual Agitators

The anti-Semitic activities in Roumania are exclusively the work of a few individual agitators who have utilized the economic depression in the country to intensify their propaganda, according to a cabled statement received here today by Lucien Wolf, secretary of the Joint Foreign Committee of the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Board of Jewish Deputies, from G. Gafencu, under-secretary of state in the council of Roumanian ministers.

The official statement, which is in the nature of a reply to the concern expressed by the secretary of the Joint Foreign Committee over the Jewish situation in Roumania, points out that for over a year the Roumanian government adopted a not too stringent policy against these agitators, a policy which the government feels gave certain satisfactory results until the election of Professor Alexander Cuza to parliament.

Until then the anti-Semitic agitation was on a very small scale, the statement explains, and had absolutely no following. The agitation in Bukowina started, according to M. Gafencu’s statement, from the peasants’ discontent against the banks and bankers and the money-lenders and took on the form of an anti-Semitic movement because the majority of these “as well as those who own capital for lending purposes are Jews.”

As proof of this explanation, Gafencu cites the fact that the discontented peasants in Balaceana broke the windows of the richer Jews’ houses but left untouched the houses of the poor Jews. Speculating on the tension between the poor population and the money-lenders, the agitators tried to take advantage of the economic situation in order to intensify their anti-Semitic propaganda, M. Gafencu says.

Following this, he points out that the government immediately took the most severe measures to put an end to the agitation, strictly forbidding meetings of a public nature and ordering the police to watch with the greatest zeal the anti-Semitic agitators. The official Roumanian statement further enumerates the number of prominent anti-Semitic agitators in various towns and villages who have been arrested and also the more than 200 peasants who are being held for participating in anti-Semitic agitation in the villages.

Emphasizing that the anti-Semitic agitation has found no response from the great masses of the Roumanian people and that only in certain sporadic instances such as at Borscha and Balaceana did the agitation have any result, due chiefly to the economic situation, the Roumanian statement declares that regarding “the exaggerated information circulated abroad concerning the anti-Semitic movement, the political factor must be taken into consideration all the more as the Jewish parties of Roumania seem to be divided as to the policy which should be followed.”