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Agitation Against Foreign Jewish Students Started Again in Czecho-slovakia

February 1, 1932
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Antisemitic excesses broke out again to-day at Fratislava (Pressburg) University. Jewish students from Foland, were driven out of the Medicla Faculty, and were told that they would not be admitted again to the University.

Neighbouring cafes where some of the students took rsfuge were attacked.

The Czech Students Organisation at Prague University has adopted a resolution demanding the enforcement of a numerus clausus against foreign Jews. A number of Deputies have promised to support their demand in Parliament.

The agitation against foreign Jewish students at the Czecho-Slovakian universities has been going on for a long time, and has several times led to serious rioting. At the end of November there were several agitation meetings held at Bratislava University, at which demands were made that no foreign Jews should be admitted to the University.

Deputy Vicanek, of the Czech Clerical Party, spoke in Parliament on November 29th demanding the enforcement of a numerus clausus against aliens, especially Jews. Czecho-Slovakia is spending large sums of money, he said, in providing Universities for alien students, who afterwards settle in

the country practising as doctors or lawyers, and taking the bread out of the mouths of our own people. Besides, he alleged, the foreign students are in most cases political undesirables, and many of them are Communists.

Deputy Hein, of the National Democratic Party, supported him, protesting against aliens being allowed to study at Czecho-Slovakian Universities, and he, too, alleged that many of the foreign students are conducting Communist propaganda.

Deputy Angelo Goldstein, one of the Jewish members of Parliament, who also raised the matter of the anti-Jewish movement at Bratislava University, obtained an assurance from the Minister of Education, Dr. Derer, a few days later, that no measures would be taken against Jewish students from abroad.

The protest made by the students because of the bad conditions with regard to accommodation at the University has now died down, the Minister went on and their demands in this connection will be kept in mind when the question of the extension of the University arises. But no measures, he repeated, will be taken against Jewish students from abroad.

Jewish students from Poland attending the Medical Faculty at Bratislava University have several times recently been barred from the lecture halls and the dissection rooms by the Nationalist students, but Jewish students who are Czecho-Slovakian citizens were not molested.

The Nationalist papers in Czecho-Slovakia support the movement against foreign Jewish students insofar as it is directed against aliens.

Serious anti-Jewish student disturbances took place at Bratislava, Prague and other Czecho-Slovakian universities in November 1929, when big forces of police, mounted and on foot, had to be called out, and scores of students were injured and arrested, and the Universities were closed for a number of days.

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