Equality Formula Outside of Minorities Pacts Seen Needed for Jews After War

After the present war a formula will have to be found ensuring complete freedom and equality for Jews as distinct from the minorities guarantees which arose from the last war, Neville Laski, retired president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, declared yesterday at a reception given by the Anglo-Palestine Club for him and Prof. Selig Brodetsky, his successor.

“We Jews must no longer allow ourselves to be robbed,” Laski said. “The whole history of the minorities treaties is a history of ignoble failure, chicanery and treachery. We cannot allow repetition of that period.”

Prof. Brodetsky stressed the necessity of Jewish unity and asserted that the problem of the Jewish people required the same high level of statesmanship that needed to be applied to the problems of other peoples. He said the Palestine problem was not whether so many Jews could enter Palestine in this or that year, but whether it was to become a land in which the problem of the Jewish people, or a considerable fraction of it, would find a solution.

All sections of British Jewry were represented at the reception, at which Simon Marks presided and joined with Moshe Shertok, head of the Jewish Agency’s political department, and others in praising Laski’s services.

Earlier, at a meeting of the Board of Deputies, Laski, speaking during the debate on the Joint Foreign Committee report, raised the question of the present Polish Government’s attitude toward the Jews, declaring that there were grave doubts as to whether the Polish Government had paid adequate attention to the Jewish aspect of Nazi persecution in Poland.

Leonard Stein, who introduced the report, said that this question was receiving attention but it was an inopportune time to develop the matter further. He said the board should refrain from criticism, but should take a broad view of the very large question which would arise in the future as to the whole problem of Polish-Jewish relations.

Prof. Brodetsky supported Stein, declaring it was necessary to make known the world over what was happening to the Jews in Poland and to bring to the notice of the Polish Government what consequences this would have upon future relations between the Jews and a reconstructed Poland. He assured the board that the Joint Foreign Committee was considering every aspect of the problem of reconstruction of the Jews in Europe when peace came.