J. D. B. News Letter

Every time a new school year starts the Jewish press in Poland is full of the question of the Jewish students and their wrongs, but unfortunately more than protest we cannot do. It is an extraordinary state of affairs, but it is a fact that in Poland, in the largest Jewish settlement in Europe, it is impossible for us to do any thing really effective to put a stop to the grievous wrongs which are constantly committed against our Jewish student youth.

Why is this? Why can we not fight against this barring of Jewish students from the Polish Universities? Why is it impossible to tear down the barrier of the numerus clausus that is put up against Jews in the Polish Universities?

Because it is impossible to fight against something which does not exist. For officially there is no such thing as a numerus clausus at the Polish Universities, though nothing is more certain than that in actual life it is very rigorously applied.

There was a time several years ago when Government quarters in Poland contemplated seriously enacting numerus clausus legislation to apply against Jews in the Polish Universities. It was no secret and the idea was openly propagated.

That was in the days when the Polish Government was constituted by the National Democratic Party, which means the anti-Semitic Party. Their Minister of Education, Glombinski, a notorious anti-Semitic Party. Their Minister of Education, Glombinski, a notorious anti-Semite, introduced a Government bill in the Polish Sejm to enforce a numerus clausus. The Club of Jewish Deputies protested at the time from the tribune of the Sejm against such a law, violating the Polish Constitution and Poland’s international guarantees. We did not confine our opposition to the Polish Sejm. We started a big protest movement which was taken up also outside the country and outside the Jewish ranks, and that protest had its effect, and the idea was dropped.

We know too well the people who were at the head of the affairs of the Polish State at that time and we know Polish conditions too well, also, to make the mistake for one moment of believing that it was our protests that had this effect. It was the protests which were made by non-Jews, above all in France, with which Poland stands in such close relations and to whose opinion she must—willing or unwilling—pay deference. The French Prime Minister of that time, M. Poincare, was the instrument through which the entire civilized world protested against the numerus clausus project sponsored by the Polish Minister of Education. And it was his protest that turned the scale.

Officially the Polish Government dropped the numerus clausus bill. In actual fact, however, the numerus clausus went into effect. Silently, unobtrusively, cloaked by all sorts of pre-