Digest of Public Opinion on Jewish Matters

[The purpose of the Digest is informative: Preference is given to papers not generally accessible to our readers. Quotation does not indicate approval.-Editor.]

The City Chamberlain of London, in his address recently conferring the Freedom of the City on Lord Reading, made special reference to anti-Semitism in the United States in connection with his remarks about Reading’s socalled “French Loan” mission to the United States during the war. This we learn from the London “Jewish World,” which writes:

“The City Chamberlain, in the course of his address, mentioned Lord Reading’s mission to the United States during the War and added that he achieved success in spite of the recognized prejudice against people of his race in that country.

“The importance of these words as an implied rebuke consists in something more than even the standing in the world of the body in whose behalf it was made,” the “Jewish World” observes. “It consists, above all, in the fact that these addresses are not delivered spontaneously or haphazardly, but are the result of careful deliberation over every sentence, and, indeed, every word. Well, regret its necessity as we may and do, there is no gainsaying the right upon its record of the City of London to protest against such anti-Judaism as prevails in the United States, even if we discount to the full some of the stories that are told concerning it. For the Corporation and the City of London stood solidly, persistently and devotedly by Baron Lionel de Rothschild in his fight for the right of a Jew to sit in Parliament without first taking an oth in repudiation of his religious belief. And that freedom from religious or racial bias has marked its career ever since, as it did before that Parliamentary struggle.”

POISH ANTI-SEMITIC PAPER ON PETLURA

An interesting description of the late Petlura is contained in the “Rzeczpospolita,” anti-Semitic paper of Warsaw, formerly owned by Ignaz Paderewski and taken over sometime ago by Korfanty.

“This former ex-actor and bathkeeper,” writes the “Rzeczpospolita” “whom events raised to the height of Attaman in Ukrainia, finished, as a matter of fact, the way all adventurers of his ilk finish. Through a crazy combination of circumstances a bathkeeper played during the war and the revolution the role of a leader.

“It was not to Poland’s honor but rather to her disgrace that she supported him, a man who sought through bloodshed, banditry, lying and treason, to play a role for which neither his character nor his abilities qualified him.

“His success was based on Polish bayonets, when Poland’s army retreated, Petlura’s fate became clear.

“But such as Petlura are not easily daunted. He took the stolen money and settled in Warsaw where he complained that the Ukrainian people had deceived him.

“Later he removed to Paris. The money which he stole from Jews and Poles gave him better opportunities than when he was a bathkeeper or when he appeared in the third rate Russian theatres; he was forgetting how much blood there was on his conscience and when he thought that he was in complete security, the Ukrainian Jew, Schwartzbard, killed him. Such was the end of the pseudo-Attaman who forgot that frequently the punishment follows the crime.”