Leaders of Pittsburgh Jewry pledged more than fifty percent of the $115,000 quota sought here for the United Jewish Appeal and other agencies when they met in the Concordia Club last night to launch this city’s drive on behalf of the nation-wide effort to obtain $3,250,000 for the relief and rehabilitation of the Jews of Germany and other lands and for the settlement of Jews in Palestine.
Contributions exceeding $58,000 followed talks made by Prof. Norman Bentwich, William Rosenwald, James N. Rosenberg, and Rabbi Solomon B. Freehof of Rodef Shalom Congregation here. Louis Caplan presided. Leo Lehman is chairman of the Pittsburgh campaign. Other officers are: William K. Frank and Alfred Oppenheimer, associate chairmen; Marcus Aaron, Mrs. Josiah Cohen, Mrs. Morris Kaufman and Mrs. Sol Rosenbloom, honorary chairmen.
600 TO COMB CITY
About 600 volunteer workers will take the field this morning to solicit additional contributions for the drive, which will continue here until May 29.
Prof. Bentwich declared that the “Jews in Germany is being put back into the position in which the Jews lived during the Middle Ages. He is deprived of his part in the civil and political life in that country; he is deprived of any opportunity in public activities, in the professions, in the arts, in journalism and literature. There is a complete and absolute denial to the younger generation of the German Jewish community of a free, upstanding living.”
Rabbi Freehof declared: “The profoundest tragedy of the Jews in Germany is not their political disability or the racial prejudice or the economic oppression; it is the position of enforced loneliness into which they are driven. Their children, who once went to school and had friends, sat by them in the classrooms, played with them on the playgrounds, are now isolated.”
Earlier in the day, 200 delegates from Jewish communities throughout the Tri-State Area, which includes western Pennsylvania, northern Ohio and West Virginia, met in the Y. M. and Y. W. H. A. to discuss plans for similar appeals which they will conduct in their own communities.
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.
