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Geneva Kehillah to Pay for Funeral of “gesture” Suicide

July 6, 1936
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The Geneva Jewish Community will defray expenses of the funeral expected to be held tomorrow for Stephen Lux, 48, Czechoslovakian Jewish journalist, who died of a bullet wound self-inflicted at a meeting of the League of Nations Assembly.

Reports that the motive for his suicide was to call attention to the plight of the Jews in Germany were ascertained today to be not entirely accurate. An examination of letters he left addressed to Captain Anthony Eden, British Foreign Secretary, and to the press showed that they do not refer to the Jewish question but warn against the “danger” of Nazi Germany to all civilization.

He will be buried in a local Jewish cemetery, according to wishes he expressed to Rabbi Poliakoff shortly before he died Friday. The rabbi visited him at the hospital, where he had been removed after rising from the photographers’ bench in the Assembly hall and shooting him-self in the head, saying, “This is the last blow.”

The journalist was not known locally, having recently arrived from Paris. Prior to 1933 he was editor of the radical Weltbuehne in Berlin, where he had lived for 25 years before taking refuge in Czechoslovakia with the advent of Hitlerism. By faith, Lux was an agnostic.

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