The fortress-town of Theresienstadt to which the Germans have deported thousands of Czech Jews, and which has been designated by Nazi ruler Reinhard Heydrich as the place where all Czech Jews will ultimately be confined, is, nevertheless, only a transit camp for Czech Jews who will eventually be deported to Poland, it was stated today by Ernst Frischer, Jewish member of the Czechoslovakian State Council, addressing a press conference here.
Frischer estimated that there are still 70,000 Jews in the Jewish quarters of Prague and that Jewish populations still reside in the towns of Brno and Brod in Southern Moravia. He declared that recent information reaching official Czech circles from Slovakia indicates that the present mass deportations of Jews, which are being carried out by the Slovak authorities, are for the purpose of concentrating all the Slovakian Jews in convenient assembly points from which they can be shipped to a "reservation area which the Nazis plan to establish for all of Europe’s Jews."
The Jewish deputy expressed the opinion that a solution of the Jewish problem in Europe is impossible in any single state, but must be based on unified Jewish demands for equality in all of Europe and the world. Frischer forecast that the difficulties of postwar economic rehabilitation of millions of Jews will undoubtedly result in mass emigration to Palestine. He stressed, however, that at the same time that Jewish groups demand free and unrestricted immigration of Jews to Palestine, they must also demand of the respective governments that those Jews who wish to return to their countries of origin must be allowed to do so and must be granted full civil rights.
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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.