Envoys Plan Appeal to Italy to Defer Expulsion of Foreign Jews

Foreign intervention in behalf of 15,000 foreign Jews slated for expulsion March 12 may be expected shortly, it was reliably learned today. Various legations, after examination of the problem, have decided that strong outside influence must be brought to bear on the Rome Government. It is believed that the Italian Government will be asked within the next few days to make good Premier Mussolini’s promises to United States Ambassador Phillips and Prime Minister Chamberlain to defer the expulsion date and to urge the Intergovernmental Refugee Committee to make a study of the situation.

Unless an arrangement can be made with the Evian body, the Interior Ministry will order mass arrests of foreign Jews on March 12. Residential permits will be extended only to those who can prove ability to emigrate within a reasonable period. It is understood that a large number of Polish Jews will share the fate of deportees from Germany who since last October have been detained at the Polish-German frontier town of Zbonszyn. These are slated for transfer in sealed trains to the “no-man’s-land” on the Polish-German border. Similarly, Rumanian, Greek and Hungarian Jews will be treated in the same way, although more diplomatically. Concentration camps, whether in Italy or Germany, loom for German Jews.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Jews from all parts of the country are streaming into Rome in a last desperate effort either to find, by canvassing foreign consulates, a country of refuge to which they can go by March 12, or to appeal to the central authorities for permission to remain in Italy a little while longer. The Government has thus far failed to give any reply, either in the affirmative or the negative, to hundreds of these individual pleas. This fact is being taken by many as a source of possible hope and an indication that the Government is at least considering the situation.

Information has been received from Rhodes that a number of Jews subject to the expulsion edict have been given permission to remain until the end of April. No reply has been received from the Government by the official Italian Jewish Refugee Committee to its petition for postponement of the expulsion deadline. (Expulsion of foreign Jews from Italian-ruled Rhodes has been postponed to April 15, according to a cable received in Jerusalem by a Jewish delegation which returned last Friday from a visit to the island to seek clemency for the threatened Jews, who number several thousands.)

Increasing concern is being felt by Italian Jewish Leaders, meanwhile, over the growing number of conversions of Jews to Catholicism, which is especially noticeable in Trieste and in the provincial towns where the Jewish communities are small and weak. Many of the conversions, it is reported, are due to the desire of the parents to assure the future welfare of their children who, as Jews, would face a bleak and almost impossible existence in Italy. As Jews, these children are barred from the State schools, and unless the communities are able to maintain their own institutions, the children are left without schooling. Conversion gives these children the right to attend the Church schools. Among those who have left the Jewish faith in recent weeks is Signor Pio Tagliacozza, a former president of the Rome Jewish Community and a prominent social worker.

Jewish communities throughout the country are now trying to organize and strengthen themselves to prevent their destruction through conversion and are seeking assistance from Jewish communities in other countries to maintain religious and educational activities. A study of the effects of the anti-Jewish decrees on the various communities is now being made and a census taken of those deprived of their means of livelihood through the closing of their vocations to Jews. The results will be used in an attempt to devise a retraining program and a Jewish employment and replacement system.