J.D.B. News Letter

(By Our Brussels Correspondent)

Immigration into Belgium, which was stopped some time ago, has now been resumed and is proceeding normally. If you go out into the streets of Antwerp or Brussels, you will meet on most of them faces which recall to you Polish, Roumanian or Lithuanian Jewries, newly-arrived immigrants going about trying to find employment. In most cases they find a job very soon; in Antwerp in the diamond industry, and in Brussels in the fancy leather goods industry, which are both in Jewish hands. The Jewish Community in Belgium is thus growing by leaps and bounds.

The Jewish streets in Antwerp are becoming too small for their populations and new streets are being taken into Jewish occupation. Whole Jewish quarters spring up overnight, and sometimes you find yourself standing stock still in the midst of a street in Antwerp wondering whether you are indeed in Belgium or whether you have suddenly been transported to Warsaw or Berditchev. As it happens, one of the new Jewish quarters is actually referred to by the Antwerp Jews as the Nalewki, the name of the Jewish quarter in Warsaw.

The Government apparently, is favoring this new immigration movement, which without doubt is stimulating trade and industry in the country, especially in advancing the diamond industry in which Belgium is competing with Holland.

There is one difficulty which the Belgian Jews have to face, and that is the question of citizenship. Nothwithstanding the friendly relations between them and the authorities, 95 per cent. of the Jews in Belgium are aliens. Recently there has been a slight improvement in this respect. Thanks to the efforts of the Socialist deputies, several hundred Jews have been naturalized, but the difficulties in regard to the mass of Jews still remain. Nevertheless, the Belgian Jews feel their lack of citizenship very little and generally speaking they suffer few disabilities because they are technically aliens. The Government treats them as if they were natives. It provides subsidies for the Jewish communities, and the Talmud Torahs and it has even granted recently a subsidy to a Yiddish secular school on the type of those in Poland.

The leaders of the central Jewish charitable institution were recently decorated by the King. Professor Ginsburg the president, was made a Knight of the Order of Leopold, and the other members of the committee were made Knights of the Order of the Crown. A week ago the Government appointed a commission for immigration, and nominated the president of the Jewish Emigrant Society (Ezra), M. Tolkowski, as vice-president of the commission. The president is a high Government official.

The friendly attitude of the Government towards the Jews is not dependent on which party happens at the moment to be in power. It is characteristic of all the Belgian political parties. Very often the Catholic party is the most friendly of all to the Jews and in trying to secure larger subsidies for religious institutions makes efforts also to obtain them for the Jewish religious institutions. Three months ago a Catholic deputy introduced a resolution in the Parliament to make Sunday observance compulsory, but his resolution was defeated.

Jewish life in Antwerp is full of vitality. There is a Yiddish weekly in the city. The various Jewish parties all have a central office in Antwerp and in general the Jews of Antwerp live a distinct life.

The growth of the Jewish community in Belgium necessitates also the expansion of the Jewish social institutions and there is talk of establishing a Jewish hospital. It is very difficult for a Jews who has to go to a hospital to find himself visited by a priest. There have even been cases in Antwerp where Jews lying on their death-bed in a hospital have been baptized by priests.

There are internal disputes, of course, among the Jewish residents. There is the confict between the Agudist Community Machziki Hadass and the Mizrachist Community Shomreh Hadass. The Shomreh Hadass, which regards itself as the official community, not long ago decided to build a new synagogue, a synagogue which would not have its like in Europe. There was talk of the Government having promised to make a grant of several million frances for the purpose and some newspaper representatives wrote up a story that the King himself would attend at the corner-laying ceremony and would lay one of the foundation stones. The story appears to have been premature. Over a million francs were put into the foundation, and when the application was made to the Government for its subsidy the Belgian franc suddenly fell and the Government found itself in great financial difficulties. The community has had to content itself with a smaller synagogue erected upon a huge foundation.

The competition between the two Jewish communities has led them to rival each other in cantors and the Jews of Antwerp have recently had the pleasure of listening to some of the finest cantors in Europe who have been seeking to obtain appointments in the Antwerp synagogues. By a strange coincidence both communities finally selected cantors from Odessa-Cantor Rabinovitch being appointed to the Shomreh Hadass and Cantor Barski to the Machziki Hadass.

There are conflicts, of course, also in Brussels, but in Brussels Jewish life is still primitive in form, like in a small town, and the conflict, too, is not as organized and developed as it is in Antwerp.

But the main point is that Belgian Jewry is divided among itself and even on a question like organizing a protest demonstration against the persecution of the Jews in Roumania, it is impossible to bring about unity between them. There are many Transylvanian Jews living in Belgium and they felt the position very keenly, especially when many of them had received alarming reports about their own relatives. It had indeed been arranged that a meeting of all parties should be held in Antwerp, but at the last moment dissensions arose and the demonstration was abandoned. In Brussels a meeting was held, but differences arose during the meeting and it broke up in disorder.

The Jewish students who are numerous in the university cities of Liege and Ghent did organize in their cities protest meetings in which the Belgian Students’ Organizations took part. These Jewish students, numbering about 2,000, who have come from Poland, Russia, Lithuania and Palestine, are for the most part living in poverty, neglected by the Jewish public and very often they have not enough to live on. Many of them go out to work at night in the coal mines or the factories in order to be able to carry on during the day with their studies. The result is that they cannot apply themselves to their studies with sufficient intensity, and often it takes them ten or twelve years before they can obtain their diploma.

Two new organizations have recently been established, both of which suggest the permanency of Jewish life in Belgium now. There is the Society for the History of the Jews in Belgium, whose work is sufficiently indicated in its name, and there is the Jewish Music Society which has its own orchestra and has arranged concerts in which some of the greatest Jewish virtuosos like Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Bronislav Huberman, and others have appeared. They both indicate the trend of Jewish life in Belgium. It is becoming firm, rooted in and has time to think of compiling historic records and organizing good music.