German Churches, Political Parties Charged with Failing to Check Anti-semitism

The churches and political parties in Germany, as well as the occupational authorities there have been charged by Rabbi Wilhelm Weinberg, spiritual leader of the Frankfurt Jewish community, with failing to help check anti-Semitic sentiment which is now growing among the German population.

“The Christian Churches, Germany’s political parties, military government–each could have done its part, but each has failed us,” the rabbi told an editor of the Saturday Evening Post. “It takes propaganda to fight propaganda and there is no massive effort to combat anti-Semitism in Germany today,” he pointed out.

Reporting this statement in the current issue of the Saturday Evening Post, Ernest O. Hauser, the journalist who discussed the question of anti-Semitism in Germany with the Frankfurt rabbi, says that of the pre-war Jewish population of 28,000 in Frankfurt only 147 were found alive when the U.S. Army entered the city in 1945. At present there are 947 Jews residing there, more than a third of whom are 55 years of age, or over.

“There is little enthusiasm over the fact that the German authorities are rebuilding–at state expense–one of Frankfurt’s main synagogues, burned down by the Nazis,” Mr. Hauser writes. He quotes Jewish residents of the city as commenting: “What for? There will never be enough Jews to fill it.”