Jewish and Christian merchants and shopkeepers in Poland are uniting in a number of places for common action against the excessive taxation imposed upon the trading classes. In several towns they are arranging joint protest movements. A protest strike has just been held at Lublin, where all the shopkeepers, Jewish and Christian, closed their shops all day on Friday and held a protest demonstration in the street. A similar protest strike has been held at Chelm.
On March 11th., 1930 a similar course of action was adopted when Jewish and non-Jewish shopkeepers and others closed their shops, workshops and offices in Warsaw and other towns of the country as a protest against the action of the Polish Government in deciding for reasons of revenue to withdraw its promised taxation relief to the trading and artisan classes. The Club of Jewish Deputies issued a proclamation at the time, in which it declared “that the merchant and artisan classes are breaking up under the pressure of the intolerable burden of taxation. The cry of desperation is going up from end to end of Poland”.
The Club of Jewish Deputies also put down an interpellation in Parliamont, drawing the attention of the Government to the “catastrophic situation of the merchant and artisan classes, which”, it said, “is being economically destroyed as a class. Bankruptcies and suicides”, it went on, “are becoming a daily event, even with the oldest and most solidly established firms. Small trading is altogether ruined. The principal cause is the excessive burden of taxation and the unequal proportion of tax distribution as between the various sections of the population, mainly to the advantage of the rural as against the urban population”.
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.
