J. D. B. News Letter

General Oprescu of the Roumanian general staff said in 1918 to Maurice Wachtel, President of the Central Committee of Native Jews: “When will you Jews understand that our dearest wish in Roumania is to get rid of you. And I may as well assure you that we will hesitate at nothing to reach our goal. As to the Jews who serve in the army, we have a very simple expedient to make them disappear. As to the Jews who remain in Roumania after the war . . . the day will come,” prophesied the General, “when they will envy those of their brethren who have died!”

HAVE NOTHING MORE TO LOSE

Twelve years have elapsed since that cynical and ghastly prediction. Twelve years of struggle and oppression and tears. Today the woe of the Jewish masses in Roumania is unimaginable. They have nothing more to lose. Their religious freedom is gone. Their educational system, laboriously built up, and at the cost of treemndous sacrifice, is wilfully sabotaged and undermined. Maniu, the Premier, whose rise inspired some hope in the days of the bloodstained Bratianu regime, has callously betrayed them. Roumania, the country they love, for which they offered their lives and possessions, the land they would like to see prosperous and progressive, whose language they speak, whose laws they resyect, whose culture they have enriched, whose spokesmen they have been with foreign powers and foreign capital, Roumania oppresses them and slowly grinds the life out of them.

DISCRIMINATION AGAINST JEWS

Pogroms? In sweet Roumania? The very question would be considered an insult in Bucharest and Jassy. But pogroms would at any rate, draw outside attention to the interior situation of Roumania, where in spite of solemn international guarantees, the Jews are the object of Governmental discrimination. Not a pound of foodstuffs was distributed to Jewish sufferers during the terrible years of the Bessarabian famine. Abroad, the Government made every effort to assure world opinion that relief was provided regardless of creed or racial affiliations. The Jews challenged the Government to print the name and address of a single Jewish family in Bessarfabia that had benefited under the Government relief plan No name was ever printed.

JEWS AT END OF RESOURCES

In Kishineff, Czernowitz, Bels and Galatz, in Bucharest itself, the Jews are at the end of their tether. Unemployment, crushing taxation, an economic crisis of unprecedented severity has brought them to the end of their resources. The blithe advice from the Organization of Roumanian Jews in America that they must learn trades and start to build up small business,