Digest of World Press Opinion

The report of the Jewish Central Committee is Berlin, carried in the Jewish Daily Bulletin two months ago, giving a summary of the Jewish situation in the Reich, is given in The New York Times of last Sunday by cable from its Berlin correspondent.

Analyzing the report, the correspondent relates:

The committee estimates that since February of last year 60,000 German Jews and some 25,000 Jews of foreign citizenship have left the country. Around 2,000 civil employes with academic preparation for their callings have been discharged and about 4,000 lawyers have lost their means of livelihood.

Another 4,000 physicians have been forbidden to act as panel doctors, which virtually destroys their chances of earning a living, or they have ben discharged from their positions in hospitals and other public and private institutions. The Jewish Central Committee estimates that 2,000 former physicians now need charity.

800 PROFESSORS OUSTED

Eight hundred non-Aryan university professors have lost their positions, and of this number 350 were deprived of all aid from the government on October 1 of last year. With very few exceptions, says the report, all of the 1,200 former Jewish journalists and writers have been expelled from their positions and have been forbidden to publish their works. About 2,000 Jewish actors, actresses, singers and vaudeville artists have found their former profession closed to them.

The committee has not been able to give as exact a picture of the losses suffered by Jewish business men and Jewish employes of banks, business houses and industries. However, the report states that a Berlin Jewish employment agency alone had 35,000 applications for work in the last three months of 1933.

An idea of the difficulties that Jewish shopkeepers and other business men are encountering may be obtained from the fact that 90,000 of them have applied to the various Jewish economic aid bureaus for information and help.

LATVIAN TERROR BREAKS CENSORSHIP

What is happening in Latvia?

Die Juedische Rundschau of Berlin reports that stringent censorship is prevailing in Latvia to prevent news about the terror there from penetrating abroad. Nevertheless the Rundschau is in a position to give the following picture:

Jews are systematically and ruthlessly removed from all civil services and municipal positions and replaced by Nationalists. Jewish doctors are being arrested in the same manner as happened in Germany and deprived of their positions with the sick-clubs in order to make room for Latvian doctors. Many teachers of the Jewish schools, mostly Socialists, have been arrested. The members of the Jewish boycott committee, which was lawfully formed to conduct the boycott of German goods in Latvia as a protest against the pesecution of Jews in Germany, and which carried on its activities in the full light of day, have been arrested and judicial proceedings have been instituted against them.

The committee which had amongst its members representatives of the liberal and orthodox Jewish bourgeoisie, has been prohibited and its former members have been accused of having by their activities prejudiced Latvia’s relations with Germany and thereby having impaired the interests of Latvia.

At the beginning of June the first transport of prisoners passed from Riga to the naval port at Libau where the first concentration camp had been established. The concentration camp has been surrounded with barbed wire entanglements. Almost every day new transports of prisoners arrive at Libau from the provinces. The outward appearance of the prisoners, who are being guarded by heavily armed escorts, points to their having suffered severe maltreatment, deprivation and despair.

URGES UNITED ACTION AGAINST GREY SHIRTS

Professor Farrington, of Cape Town University, publishes an article in The Cape Times, daily newspaper in South Africa, advocating an organized effort on the part of Gentiles to counteract anti-Semitic propaganda. The professor declares:

It adds to my respect for the Jews to observe them defend themselves as well as they can. But this is not a matter for the Jews. They are the immediate victims of the agitation which is being fomented by the Grey Shirts. That is no reason to leave the defense or the freedom and decency of public life in the Union of South Africa to the small percentage of the population represented by the Jews.

The Grey Shirts profess to be the champions of Christian morals, of Christian standards, of Christian practices. It is not for the Jew to say whether the Grey Shirts are justified or not in the claim they make for themselves. It is for the heirs of the Christian tradition to welcome or repudiate their self-appointed champions.

And let us not delude ourselves that the menace is not great. What the Grey Shirts are preaching is the fanatical creed of the absolute dictator of a European State of sixty-seven millions. This blasphemous and vulgar creed is enthroned on the episcopal seat of the head of the German national church. Millions of cultivated Germans either accept it to their shame or reject it to their peril. We are neither better than the Germans nor better educated. What has happened to them can happen to us. It is not a time to be idle.

FEDER’S DISCHARGE BRINGS COMMENT

The New York Herald Tribune, commenting editorially on the dismissal of Gottfried Feder, the man responsible for the anti-Semitic paragraph in the Nazi program, says:

The usefulness of the “splendid war cry,” which made possible the denunciation of every Jew with a pfennig above his needs as a “speculative capitalist,” is now past. The embarrassment of it, when Feder, who is not a slogan-maker but an ideologist, insists upon applying his precepts to the “speculative capitalism” of Schacht’s excellent “Aryan” coterie, is beyond the scope of the Reichsfuehrer’s loyalty. Here falls the first Nazi head for too great loyalty to first principles.

DAMASCUS ARABS FOR IMMIGRATION

That Zionism is not dangerous for Syria is the opinion expressed by a Damascus paper, Lissan Alakhar, in connection with the invitation Syrian authorities have extended the Jews. The Arab paper writes:

Why has Zionist been depicted as a dangerous movement aspiring to come to Syria only to destroy its economic and political life?

Has Zionism devoured Palestine like a swarm of locusts, or has it brought wealth and prosperity to it? There is no poverty in Palestine today. In place of ruins magnificent buildings have been erected. Roads have been laid down connecting villages and towns. Why should we object to the immigration of Jews to Syria? It is not dangerous or criminal; it is rather wrong of us to oppose it. We ought to demand Jewish immigration, for through it our situation will be saved.