Jewish Achievements in Palestine a Miracle, Says Holmes in 2nd Lecture

The accomplishments of the Jewish pioneers in Palestine in the course of thirty years can only be described in the terms of a miracle, is the opinion of Rev. John Haynes Holmes. It transcends any similar movement in history. What the Pilgrim Fathers of America accomplished over the same period of years cannot begin to compare with the achievement in Palestine where already the flower and the fruit have begun to appear, declared Dr. Holmes in the course of his second lecture on Palestine, Wednesday evening at the Community Church.

A large audience, the majority of whom were Jewish, which filled the Church to overflowing, followed Dr. Holmes in his recital of economic, industrial, cultural and sanitary development of Palestine under Zionist direction. Nathan Straus, Jr., presided.

What Dr. Holmes called his “too discouraging picture” of the week before, was tempered on Wednesday with abounding enthusiasm for what has been done under the most ad-

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verse circumstances. In order to show the promise, he said, there was every reason to emphasize the other side of the picture.

The pioneers who are the heroes of present-day Palestine, are destined to be remembered among the great achievers of human history, he stated.

“When I saw the soil, the circumstances, the tools used for work on the land and the contentment that prevailed, I found myself thinking of American farmers clamoring for relief, telling politicians that it is impossible to have a comfortable existence on the land. I thought of our American farmers with their automobiles and their radios and I had the feeling that they don’t know what poverty is and what it means to dig down into the soil with their bare hands to produce, not luxury, but daily sustenance,” he declared.

The influence of the Jewish farmer in Palestine is beginning to flow back into other lands. What is being achieved in Palestine is making over the whole character of the Jewish people throughout the world. Palestine is building a new society from the very bottom up.

The agricultural settlements, he said, were to him the most interesting developments in Palestine and of the three types existing, from the standpoint of sheer adventure, the contact with the communes, the most glorious experience. The communes, he said, have abolished the two abominations of modern civilization-private ownership and wage labor. There can never be any democracy, he declared, until we get away from private ownership and the principle, so prevalent in the United States, that each man lives on the labor of others.

Dr. Holmes emphasized that the communists in Palestine dislike to be identified with Russian Bolshevism. They are against Russian Bolshevism as a type of communism enforced from above for purely materialistic ends, whereas real communism, such as theirs, must grow from below, with a spiritual aim.

The communes are very puritanical, maintain strict monogamy and know nothing about free love. They set an example to the rest of the world. There is no philandering, divorces are unheard of Philandering, the colonists explain, is a product of leisure. They have no leisure. Divorce is bourgeois, the result of economic competition between husbands and husbands and families and families. In the communes there is no competition for no one owns anything.

“It is a magnificent spectacle, and from the standpoint of adventure and concentration, I have never seen anything like it. Even if they should disappear they have been a beneficent influence. Not only are they much cheaper to conduct, but they offer a superb training school for untrained labor and are making a splendid spiritual contribution,” he declared.