ident of the French-Palestine Committee.
The memorandum, which is based on the most recent statistics and reports compiled in Poland, depicts a situation which demands immediate remedy. It says that the Jews are not permitted to emigrate while they are at the same time debarred of the right to enter state employment. They are all but prohibited from receiving state aid.
One of the facts emphasized in the memorandum is that among the half million state employees in Poland there are no Jews at all, although about a third of the population of Warsaw is Jewish. In the city there are but two Jewish employees in the street car system.
According to the memorandum, Jewish professional schools enjoy only one-fifth per cent of the state subsidies granted to professional schools. Similar discrimination prevails against the Union of Jewish Credit Cooperatives.
The Jewish population is threatened with a new law that will require that they obtain commercial licenses, for business purposes, the memorandum states, adding, “The misery of the Jews is threatening their physical existence. Nearly half of the Jews in Warsaw, Lodz and Leopol are unable to pay the tax of five zlotys a year.”
“Tens of thousands of four-year-old children are awakened at dawn each day and put to work on sewing buttons and other tasks, in this way receiving a meagre portion of bread for their daily fare.”
The memorandum points out that discrimination against Jewish physicians, doctors and artisans is growing more noticeable each day.
Reports filed in Warsaw during the past few weeks have proclaimed the hardships confronting Polish Jews, who are the subject of repeated physical attacks at the hands of anti-Semitic groups. Only yesterday six Jewish residents of the township of Czerwinski, near Wyszograd, were seriously injured by a group of hostile peasants as they were alighting from a ferry which had crossed the Vistula River. The Yiddish press is being punished by confiscation. Police are reported to be almost ineffective in the face of the disorders.
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