All highways and roads in the Nazi occupied part of the Ukraine are strewn with tortured and battered Jews, it was reported here last night at a Jewish mass meeting which was addressed by Jewish writers and artists, including David Bargelaon Perets Markich Prof. Kapitsa, Ilya Ehrenburg, Sergei Eisenstein and others.
The meeting addressed an appeal to the Jews of the world "to listen to the guns of Gemel and the voices of the murdered Jewish woman of Berdichev" and to realise that the Nazis are determined to wipe out the Jewish people as a national. It called an the Jews of the world to actively participate in the fight against Hitlerism wherever they are.
"The Nazis have made up their minds to completely annihilate the Jews as a people, but the Jews are determined to live and not to dia," said David Bergelson, prominent Jewish writer, who spoke at the meeting. He described how a German commanding officer, occupying a small town in the Ukraine summoned the local Jewish leaders and asked them why the Jews in occupied Russian territory do not commit mass suicide as did the Jews in Germany and in Austria. "You certainly possess less pride than the Jews of Berlia and Vienna," the German officer reprimanded the Russian Jews.
Giving similar descriptions of Nazi encryption and brutality Peretz Markish, prominent Jewish poet, pointed out that the Jews in Russia do not think of ever committing suicide. The Jewish people," he said, "must live and justify its existence and its history." Prof. Kapitea, addressing the gathering, pointed to the "great indebtedness which the world of science owes to the Jews since they always worked for the country in which they live, thereby increasing the progress of the world."
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.
