The Czernowitz Jewish Community has this week erected a memorial to the Jewish student David Falik, who was shot dead in November, 1926 by the anti-Semitic student leader Nicholas Totu while Falik and several other Jewish students of the Czernowitz Secondary School were being tried for having organized a demonstration against their professors as a protest against the latter’s having disqualified 80 per cent of the Jewish students in the examinations.
Totu, who was associated with Danila, Codreanu and other anti-Semitic agitators in the incitement which recently led to the Borsha, Suceava, Szhiget and other anti-Jewish outbreaks, was put on trial for murder, but was acquitted after Professor Cuza had spoken for the defence, describing him as “our dear child” Totu and declaring that “Totu deserves not to be condemned, but to be canonized for all time.”
“The student Totu who has killed the boy Falik,” wrote the “Glasul Bucovinei” after the crime, “has been fed on Cuzist teachings of the kind which are spread also by Zelea Codreanu, to the effect that the Jews must be got out of Roumania and must be killed, that the Jew is not a human being, and so on. Such teachings quickly enter the mind of excited youths, and a madman is found who gets hold of a weapon and fires.”
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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.
