100,000 Jewish Children in Devastated Communities of Eastern Europe Benefit from Institutions Sponso

More than 100,000 Jewish children in the devastated communities of Eastern Europe are now directly benefiting from institutions under the sponsorship of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and a sense of responsibility such as American communities exercise for child care, health, and vocational training has been stimulated in these communities through the child welfare work the Joint Distribution Committee has introduced, according to David M. Bressler, member of the executive committee, and Joseph C. Hyman, its executive secretary, whose first-hand report on that body’s reconstructive activities abroad has just been made public.

Messrs. Bressler and Hyman, on their recent tour of investigation of the organization’s work in thirteen countries in Eastern Europe, found that even the most impoverished Jewish communities make strenuous efforts to bulwark with local financial contributions the child welfare standards established by the Joint Distribution Committee.

When the report was released at the J. D. C. headquarters, it was announced that part of the funds obtained from the Allied Jewish Campaign now under way throughout the country, will be used to maintain and extend the child care work.

In their survey, Messrs. Bressler and Hyman diagnose the present economic distress among Jews in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Roumania, Austria, Hungary, and other countries, and deal largely with the Committee’s credit and free loan associations, which are helping the Jews to regain their economic self-dependence, and describe in detail the efforts to protect children from disease and to prepare them for future self-support. Such activities are conducted by orphan asylums which take entire charge of 18,000 children; by public health clinics of the Eastern Europe Jewish health societies, such as the Oze and Toz, which receive support from the Joint Distribution Committee and minister to 66,000 children; by trade schools established by the Joint Distribution Committee or affiliated organizations, such as the Ort and the Ica, which train over 10,000 children outside of those in the orphan asylums; and by summer colonies to which over 10,000 other anaemic and under-nourished children are sent annually.

“Today there are about 18,000 orphans cared for in Eastern Europe, some 13,000 in Poland alone, by central child care organizations and other separate institutions,” write Messrs. Bressler and Hyman. “The budgets of these central organizations have been met in part by the J. D. C., but increasingly the J. D. C. has sought to stimulate the local Jewish populations to take up the burden of current maintenance requirements, while the J. D. C. has contributed essential equipment, machinery, tools, sanitary facilities, or has made possible indispensable repairs and rebuilding. In as many instances as possible, all this has been conditioned upon the assumption of proportions of these outlays by the Jewish native population.

“The Child Care Federation in Poland, brought into being through the activity of the J. D. C., cares for over 13,600 orphans. Its yearly budget has approximated $650,000. Until recently, the J. D. C. provided the largest contribution to this budget, the remainder being covered respectively by the Jewish communities themselves and by state and municipal subsidies,” the report declares.