Charges Provocation Used to Ruin Jewish Agriculture in Roumania

Charges that efforts are being made to ruin Jewish agriculture in Roumania by provocation, are made by “Unser Zeit.”

For some time a persistent policy to ruin Jewish tobacco growers has been in progress, “Unser Zeit” says. Tobacco production has been placed under a State monopoly, with the result that thousands of Jewish farmers who derived their livelihood in this fashion have been ruined, the paper writes.

The State monopoly has in addition produced ridiculously low prices for tobacco, which has added to the distress of the Jewish tobacco grower.

Now, the paper writes, methods of provocation have been adopted in order to oust the Jewish farmer completely.

In the village of Yakimeuz, near Urhiev, a search was organized in the middle of the night in the house of a Jewish tobacco grower, Meyer Kogan. At three o’clock in the morning a special commission from Urhiev called at his house and asked him to open a barn where the raw tobacco was stored. Kogan immediately noticed that a new lock had been fastened to the door and that his watch-dog had been poisoned. He was forced to break the new lock and discovered within the barn a quantity of tobacco which did not belong to him and a machine for cutting tobacco which had been planted on him. Thereupon a charge that he was trading in contraband tobacco was preferred against him.

This accusation was finally proved groundless when non-Jewish peasants testified that the Jew engaged in legal business only, but this method of the authorities to ruin Jewish agriculturists is illuminating, the paper comments.