J. D. B. News Letter

The Eastern provinces of the Czecho-Slovakian Republic contain a dense Jewish population, especially Carpatho-Russia and large parts of Slovakia. The Jewish population in these parts is not only numerically but also Jewishly strong. They retain completely the old Jewish distinctive religious and national culture. They carry on a separate Jewish communal life, imbued with deep religious feeling, with East European folk ways and their own distinctive Jewish forms of life, not only inwardly, but also outwardly. The process of disintegration of Jewish life in contact with Western civilization, and the dangers of assimilation have hardly touched this Jewry. The intense Jewish life in this reservoir of Jewish religious and national orthodoxy bids fair to stand firm like an iron wall for many years to come against all the assaults from the West.

The exact opposite obtains in the Western parts of the Republic. Except for a few small orthodox separatist communities, and a few Zionist efforts aiming at a revival of Jewish national, political and cultural activity, the Jews in Moravia, Bohemia and Silesia are rapidly assimilating, becoming absorbed.

There are not many Jews, and they are scattered all over the country-a couple of dozen Jews in this town and in that among a thousand non-Jews, with all Jewish national-cultural distinctiveness, or traditional religious Judaism gone. There is complete lingual and cultural assimilation with the Germans here, and the Czechs there and these Jews are completely cut off from Jewish life as a whole. They have lost all Jewish distinctiveness. Old Jewish communities in towns and villages are dying out. There is not a minyan of Jews left in them. Not even three Jews to say grace together at the table. The Orthodox Jewish newspapers published in Czecho-Slovakia are full of letters from readers complaining that in this or the other famous ancient Jewish community the synagogues and the community buildings have been turned into business houses, factories, even stables for cattle. The last Jewish family in this town or in that has sold the Jewish communal property, and the new non-Jewish owner is putting it to a different use.

This is happening not in two different countries, but in the same Czecho-Slovakian Republic-in one part of Czecho-Slovakia, in the west, Jewishness is dying, crumbling, as a result of former affluence and over-advanced emancipation, while in the other, in the East, Jewish life is strong and virile, culturally and religiously, while materially, there is over-crowding and economic distress. In the one place too many Jews, in the other not enough Jews.

Might it not be a good thing to merge these two sections of Jews, citizens of the same country, to help the one economically, and the other Jewishly?

The Jewish press of Czecho-Slovakia is busy now discussing the question. Why, they ask, should these two Jewries living in one and the same country be sundered in this way, as if they were two different peoples, living in two different countries? The only points of contact between them are the Zionist Organization, which embraces some of the Jews in both sections and a few schools conducted by the modernized orthodox movement.

So there is a discussion going on about the practical possibilities of settling a number of Jewish families from the Eastern districts in the midst of the weaker Jewish communities of the Western provinces.

In ordinary times, with economic conditions more or less stable, the idea would not encounter any serious difficulty, but at the present time, with the economic crisis growing, even in the industrialist and highly developed Western provinces, there is little room for additional Jewish merchants and shopkeepers to come in from the Eastern provinces. Still less for the young Jewish workers from Carpatho-Russia. The Czech and German trade unions would resist such an invasion even by resorting to Nationalist and anti-Semitic slogans.

So the thing has to be put off till better times come. There is room, however, for a number of artisans, and the idea has been mooted to begin by transplanting some tailors, cabinetmakers, house-painters, upholsterers and the like. As a precedent, it is pointed out, that there has been a stream of orthodox Eastern Jewish arisans within the last few years into Toeplitz and Maehrisch-Ostrau that has kept these two communities alive.

The Jewish nationalist modernized papers refuse to place any hope in such an internal colonization plan. They do not believe that it is possible to maintain Judaism in the highly culture Western provinces, by the observance of the Shulchan Aruch and the wearing of beards and earlocks.

There is consequently a heated quarrel going on between the orthodox and the modernists. And before it had been in progress very long, the antisemites joined in. The anti-Semitic papers are holding up the bogey of an East-European Jewish invasion into the Western provinces. The “Robotnicki Novini,” a Labor paper, is terribly afraid lest the Jewish youth of Carpatho-Russia will invade the Czech countries.