There is hardly a Jewish family in Germany without some destitute member, Leonard Montefiore, president of the Anglo-Jewish Association, declared today in a speech delivered at the annual meeting of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
The Berlin Jewish community provided help for 23,000 destitute Jews of the city in 1933, Montefiore said, and added that many Jewish hospitals and communal institutions have already been closed or are on the verge of closing. Only 15,000 of the 60,000 Jewish children of school age are attending Jewish schools, and it is imperative to establish more Jewish schools in Germany to protect the children from the bullying they receive in the general German schools, he declared.
“In view of the embittered attack against the Jews, not only in Germany but throughout the world, I am unable to understand the policy of selfish isolation advocated in some quarters,” Montefiore asserted.
HONOR DEMANDS HELP
“This is an attack against Jewry as a religion and as a race Whatever sort of Jews we are, Zionist or non-Zionist, rich or poor, however slender is the chain binding us to Judaism, honor demands that we help this conflict,” he concluded.
In his presidential review of the year’s activities of the Board of Deputies, president Neville J. Laski declared that the period held anxieties too numerous to mention, but the outstanding anxiety was the situation of the Jews in Germany.
“Hitlerism, not content with discriminatory measures against the Jews in Germany, has created agencies throughout the world through which false and malicious propaganda is being spread,” Laski said. “This propaganda is creating race hatred and prejudice everywhere and Jews must look beyond Jewry and appeal to world opinion to fight this menace,” he concluded.
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.
