A definite, carefully planned and persistent campaign on the part of Poles to eliminate Jews from trade, industry and handicrafts in Poland, was charged by Zelig Tygel of New York, executive director of the Federation of Polish Jews in America, addressing the world conference of Polish Jews now in session here.
Mr. Tygel’s allegations were made in the course of his report yesterday to the conference on the economic position of the Jews in Poland. Pointing out that at least one-third of Poland’s 3,500,000 Jews are unemployed and starving, he put the blame on the economic consequences of the war, the world-wide depression and the policies of the Polish Government.”
“Political and economic anti-Semitism in Poland,” he said, “have their roots in the ignorance and poverty of the Polish masses and are fanned by such avowedly anti-Semitic organizations as the National Democratic Party and their extremist wing, the Naras, not to mention the sinister influence of Nazi Germany.”
The most damaging single blow struck at the Jewish economic position, Mr. Tygel asserted, was the institution of State monopolies of industries eliminating many of the Jewish enterprises. These State monopolies, too, he charged, practically boycott the employment of Jews in government industries.
“Furthermore, Jews are finding it more and more difficult to enter the professions,” he said. “In the cartel industries and in the factories hardly any Jews are employed as chemists, engineers and technicians.”
Summarising the present position of Jewish workers in Poland, Mr. Tygel stated that there are now 200,000 Jewish laborers and 47,000 other types of Jewish employes in the country. Unemployment in this group amounts to 60 per cent, he said, and most of them cannot benefit by unemployment insurance since they were employed in plants of less than twenty people.
The essential requirements of Polish Jews, one-third of whom are artisans and another third traders, is cheap credit and the productivization and restratification of the Jewish masses, Mr. Tygel declared. He urged a program of rationalizing the Jewish workshops by introducing modern machinery and raising the standard of work. For the merchant class he urged elimination of unproductive units, extension of cooperative buying and the introduction of modern methods of selling.
Mr. Tygel concluded with an appeal for united action, stating that “despite the efforts by our federation in every country, the situation of Jews in Poland still remains catastrophic.”
“While the Polish Government has not yet gone as far as to adopt anti-Semitic legislation, nevertheless the government’s policy towards the Jews is just as disastrous as in Germany,” Samuel G. Domash, vice-president of the Federation of Polish Jews, charged at tonight’s session.
Recalling that the formal intervention of American Jews at the time of the anti-Jewish pogroms in Poland after the war had some effect, he demanded action of the conference in name of Polish Jews of all countries.
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.
