Back to Land Movement is Supported by German Jews

(Jewish Telegraphic Agency)

The movement for Jewish Land Settlement in Germany, which is being carried on by the Union of Jewish Ex-Soldiers, is the subject to which an issue of the “Juedische Liberale Zeitung” is devoted. The issue contains articles by Professor Dr. Franz Oppenheimer. Dr. Berthold Timendorfer, former President of the German B’nai Brith, and Rudolf Mosse, a Jewish estate owner.

The President of the Union of Jewish Ex-Soldiers in Germany, Dr. Leo Loe-wenstein, writes: “We German Jews were for centuries settled on our own land on the Rhine, the Main and the Danube, respected by land owners, bishops and people, until the fanaticism of the Crusades and of the succeeding centuries drove us from our soil and shut us up in the stilling ghettoes of the town. The campaign of the Union of Jewish Ex-Soldiers in Germany is a gateway to lead the German Jews out of the ghettoes on to the body and soul-strengthening land. We want to have our part in German soil, for which we German Jews fought like every other section of the people. It is a hard task which we have taken upon ourselves, but it is the most important task before German Jewry today, and we shall carry it out, we German Jews, to the welfare of our future generations so that they may root themselves more deeply into the German Fatherland and be still more closely identified with it in life and death.”

An appeal for funds has been issued in connection with the movement, which says:

“The Union of Jewish Ex-Soldiers in Germany seeks to settle Jewish peasants on German land. On the advice of leading experts, the Union to which most of the Jewish land owners in Germany belong, has started a great settlement work which will be carried on in association with all Jewish organizations, irrespective of party or tendency. Trained Jewish farmers and gardeners will be settled on the land under the direction of experts. The first condition will be that each piece of land must pay for itself, and the scheme which has been adopted guarantees this. The Union of Jewish Ex-Soldiers in Germany, with its tens of thousands of members, is only the pioneer, the appeal concludes, of this idea, which is a part of its general task to act as a shield for the right and the honour of German Jewry.”

Professor Franz Oppenheimer writes that the movement is one which the German Jews should support both as Germans and as Jews. “Antisemitism, which insults us as citizens and harms us in the economic sense,” he says, “uses as one of its strongest arguments the allegation that the Jewish is only able to be a parasite, that he is in body too weak and in spirit too indolent to adopt the life of a tiller of the soil. A few thousand good German peasants in Germany are of greater importance for the combating of anti-Semitism that all the work of the Central Union and the other similar bodies.”

Professor Oppenheimer says that the Union has decided to adopt his system of intensive colonization in carrying out the scheme and shows how this system is best suited for the purpose, “The scheme,” he concludes, “requires considerable sums of money and I hope that German Jewry will raise these necessary funds so that this important German and Jewish work should be carried out with complete success.”