J.t.a. Mission Been of Tremendous Value in Obtaining Minister of Interior’s Assurance on Staatenlose

The signed statement given by the Minister of the Interior, M. Aravichus, to Mr. Jacob Landau and Mr. B. Smolar (reported in the J.T.A. Bulletin of the 10th. inst.) on the position of the Staatenlose in Lithuania will be welcomed by the Jewish population with great satisfaction, Mr. R. Rubinstein, the editor-inachief of the “Yiddishe Stimme” here, one of the leaders of Lithuanian Jewry, writes in an editorial in his paper to-day. The J.T.A. mission to Kovno has been of tremendous value to the Jews of Lithuania, he says, in having obtained such a declaration.

What Jewish reader does not know the initials J.T.A., Dr. Rubinstein writes further. They stand for the name of the valuable, well-tried, and exhaustive news service of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from all parts of the Jewish world. Until the J.T.A. started it little over ten years ago, the Jewish press could not boast of such a luxury as a world-wide Jewish news service. The success of the now enterprise proved its need. Jewish life in the post-war period was most complex. New Jewish communities grew up, new social and national movements came into being. The struggle for existence waged by the Jews became harder than ever. The Jewish press developed on a large scale and before long hundreds of Jewish newspapers were being published. A regular objective Jewish news-service is to-day a vital necessity to the Jewish press which serves millions of Jewish readers. This is the work done by the J.T.A. It has become the vital nerve of the Jewish newspaper. It joins together the scattered Jewish communities of the world. It links Kovno with Buenos Aires; Warsaw with San Francisco. Without the J.T.A. one could not now conceive of a normal Jewish daily press. In addition, the J.T.A. serves a large part of the non-Jewish press on happenings relating to Jews and Jewry obtained from a reliable source, which helps to improve relations between peoples and to make for an understanding of Jewish ideals, sufferings, hopes.

There is another work in which the J.T.A. is engaged to its great honour, the “Stimme” continues. The J.T.A. service is also read by politicians and diplomats and very often it happens that the Roumanian or Polish Ambassador in the United States or elsewhere learns through the J.T.A. service of persecutions inflicted on the Jews of his own country. Knowing how such news is damaging to the interests of his country, he generally brings it to the notice of his Government. Trying to deny the J.T.A. reports has been shown by experience to be ineffective, because the J.T.A. maintaining its own correspondents all over the world is in a position to substantiate its reports.

We Lithuanian Jews could tell many an interesting story of this direct effect of the J.T.A. service on Governmental policy in Jewish affairs, the “Stimme” writes. Governments and diplomats know that there is an eye that sees, an ear that hears, and that the telegraph and the telephone immediately make what has been seen and heard known throughout the world. Also the interviews which the special representatives of the J.T.A. have obtained with Ministers and leading politicians concerning the political and legal status of their Jewish communities are of inestimable value. As a famous Jewish journalist once put it, the J.T.A. is a Jewish Ambassador without a State.