Polish Ex-premier Professor Bartel Mobbed by Antisemitic Students While Walking in Lemberg Street Wi

Professor Bartel, who was the first Prime Minister under the present Pilsudski regime, which began with the May Rising of 1926, was mobbed in the streets of Lemberg to-day by National Democratic students, and he and a lady with whom he was walking were pelted with rotten eggs.

The attack was made on Professor Bartel, because it was he who at the meeting of the Lemberg University Senate had moved the resolution rejecting the demand of the National Democratic students that the Jewish student Bauer, the only Jewish student at the Academy of Forestry and Lands should be expelled, and punishing the ring-leaders of the movement by suspending two of them, the students Korzeniowski and Milewski, and reprimanding 15 others.

Professor Bartel in his first statement of policy in the Seym in July 1926 promised that the economic antisemitism pursued hitherto in Poland would be stopped, because it was harmful to the interests of the State as a whole. In this connection, he said, credits would in future be issued by the State Bank and other State Institutions exclusively on consideration of how far the credit loans were economically justified, without any question being raised of the religious or national affiliations of the individuals or firms which applied for credit facilities.

The Government, he went on, did not intend to enter into any secret agreements with the Jewish population (a reference to the Polish-Jewish Agreement concluded between the Grabski Government and the Club of Jewish Deputies). In contradistinction to such agreements, the Government would see to it that the Constitution should be fully enforced in all respects.

All restrictions against the Jews or other sections of the population which were still on the Statute Book from the days when Congress Poland was under the Czarist regime, would be annulled. With regard to trading hours, the Government would introduce a law which would regulate this question solely in the interests of the consumers and the shopkeepers and traders.

Deputy Gruenbaum, speaking at the time said that for the first time a Polish Premier had definitely and openly declared that economic antisemitism was harmful to the whole State. The Club of Jewish Deputies, he declared, had confidence in the Bartel Government and would vote in favour of giving it the wide powers which it demanded in its Bill for the amendment of the Constitution.

Soon after, difficulties occurred, however, between the Bartel Government and the Jewish Club of Deputies, and protests were made by the Jewish spokesmen in the Seym against the non-fulfilment of Professor Bartel’s promises, and against the dictatorial powers assumed by the Pilsudski regime.