Dismissing Staatenlose from Employment in Lithuania: Employers Instructed by Kovno District Chief to

The Chief of Kovno City and District has issued the following statement:

The Department for the Protection of Citizens published a statement on the 10th. ultimo that beginning January 1st., 1932 no employment permits will be issued to aliens in any branch of activity. I accordingly notify aliens living in Kovno City and District that I am calling upon the proprietors of enterprises employing aliens to arrange before that date for engaging Lithuanian citizens in their stead.

S.O.S. TO WORLD JEWRY ISSUED BY JEWISH LEADERS IN LITHUANIA THROUGH. J.T.A.: YIDDISH PRESS APPEARS WITH BIG BLANKS BECAUSE CENSOR CUT PROTESTS AGAINST NEW ORDER: KOVNO POLICE CHIEF TELLS J.T.A. COMMUNIQUE BADLY EDITED: INTENDED TO PREVENT NEW ALIEN ARRIVALS OBTAINING EMPLOYMENT NOT TO DISPLACE ALIENS LONG SETTLED IN COUNTRY: YIDDISH PRESS NOT REASSURED: FEARS IF ORDER NOT WITHDRAWN IT WILL BE CARRIED INTO FULL FORCE.

An S.O.S. to world Jewry has been sent out to-day through the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by the leaders of Lithuanian Jewry, in view of the new order, which it is feared will ruin Jewish life in the country by throwing out of employment thousands of Jews, who have no other home, a great number of them holding Nansen passports.

The Chief of the Kovno Police Department, M. Nawakas, said in an interview with the J.T.A. representative here to-day that the official statement had not been properly edited. The intention, he claimed, is to prevent the employment of newly-arrived aliens, but not of aliens who have been long resident in the country.

The Jewish leaders are not reassured, however, and feel that if the order is not withdrawn entirely it will be carried into force, with the term alien defined as broadly as the authorities may wish, depriving thousands of people of their employment, only because they cannot produce sufficient formal evidence to prove their right to Lithuanian citizenship.

The police are already collecting signatures from alien Jews here pledging themselves not to seek employment beginning January 1st., 1932.

Most of the Jews concerned belong to three categories: people who left Vilna with the Lithuanian army when Poland took possession of the Vilna District in 1920; people whom the Russian army during the war expelled from the war zones into what is now Lithuania, and Staatenlose who have lived in Lithuania for the past ten years, but have no evidence of nationality. All of them consider themselves Lithuanians, who have no other home. The Jewish leaders here believe that the only way is to persuade the Government to naturalise these Jewish aliens, who have all lived in the country sufficiently long to be entitled to naturalisation.

The Jewish population is in a state of panic, but the Yiddish Press is unable to express the full extent of Jewish feeling on the subject, because of the severe censorship applied under the present military dictatorship. The Yiddish Press to-day is full of blank spaces where the censors have cut out big chunks of the editorials protesting against the Kovno Chief’s communique. The papers describe the order in those passages which have escaped the censorship as the worst blow sustained by Lithuanian Jewry.