A petition will be presented to the League of Nations by the American Jewish Congress, through Dr. Leo Motzkin, chairman of the Committee of Jewish Delegations, and Dr. Emil Margulies, Czechoslovakian Jewish leader, who presented the Bernheim petition to the League, requesting the League Council to extend its jurisdiction over anti-Semitic discriminations beyond Upper Silesia to include the whole of Germany.
The American Jewish Congress will also appeal to the British Government, requesting it to introduce the subject at the next session of the Council, which will be held in September.
The petition to the League of Nations will be based on the moral and legal grounds implicit in Article 4, section 5 of the League Covenant, empowering the League to act on “any matter within the sphere of action of the League or affecting the peace of the world”.
A statement issued jointly by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, honorary president, and Bernard S. Deutsch president of the Congress, following an executive session of the administrative committee, here, points out that the League decision on the Bernheim petition has “established the principle that the legal limitations imposed upon the Jews of Upper Silesia on the ground of their faith and race cannot be accepted by the civilized opinion of the world”, and that the next step is for the League to apply this stand to all of Germany.
“This must be the next step of the League”, the statement says. “It cannot, we maintain, as the arbiter of international law and morality, limit by territorial divisions within one and the same country the application of a principle which it condemns.”
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