Jewish Situation in Poland: No Numerus Clausus Minister of Edugation Says in J.t.a. Interview: Expla

There are no restrictions against Jewish students entering the Polish Universities, the Minister of Education and Public Worship, Dr. Czerwinsky, said in an interview with Mr. Jacob Landau, the Managing Director of the J.T.A., Mr. B. Smolar, Special J.T.A. Representative, and Mr. M. Mozes, the Director of the J.T.A. in Warsaw. There are only certain restrictions at the Faculty of Medicine and at the Polytechnic regulating admission to the laboratories, the Minister went on, because there are not enough laboratories to admit all applicants. These restrictions, however, affect all students without exception, and do not operate against students belonging to any particular religion. This can be proved by the figures. The Jewish students at the Polish Universities number about 21 per cent. of the total, and at Vilna University the Jewish students at one of the courses number 40 per cent. of the total.

so far as I myself am concerned, the Minister proceeded, I want to make it quite clear that I am a determined opponent of any kind of machine-like regulation of the number of students of a certain nationality or religion.

Speaking next of the allocations made in the Budget for Jewish religious requirements, the Minister admitted that the Budget does not provide more than 240,000 zlotys for this purpose. It is indeed a small amount, he said, compared with the amounts provided for certain other religions. But the reason is simple, he went on. The subsidies granted by the State to the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches are based on the fact that these Churches at one time owned great properties, which were taken over by the State, and if for no other reason than that the State has certain important obligations towards these Churches. The Jewish religious Community did not own such properties. The Jewish religious also has no such widely-branched and expensive a hierarchy as these Churches. Certainly, the Minister said, there is no intention of discriminating deliberately in the treatment of the Jewish religion.

Dealing with the objections raised in some quarters to the new election ordinance to the Jewish communities, which empowers the communities to exclude from membership people who have publicly opposed religion, the Minister said that in respect to the Jewish religious communities, the Government stands on the same position as in respect to all other religions organisations, considering it harmful both to the interests of the State and the interests of the religious organisations themselves, to permit political activities or tendencies to be introduced into the realm of religious activity. We do not desire to have the Jewish religious communities trann-formed into political factors, he said. There were two ways in which we would attain this aim – either by limiting rigidly the field of activity of the Jewish communities and subjecting them to a very thorough supervision and control, or else to allow the communities the widest possible field of activity and enable them to protect themselves against the attempt to turn them into political bodies. We chose the second alternative. The present ordinance will not, of course, eliminate all that makes for political conflict in the Jewish communities, which includes representatives of the Orthodox and the Zionist groups, and of the Bund. The Ordinance will have the effect, however, of excluding those groups which openly tend in their programme and ideology to fighting against religion. It would be really grotesque, he said, to have in the religious Jewish community people who consider it as one of their principal objects to fight against religion.

This point, he went on, is of great importance to the Government, which obviously could not tolerate anti-State movements and organisations, which are prevented by the law from conducting their activities legally in any public organisations or institution, being enabled to carry on their anti-State activities inside the Jewish communities. This refers, of course, only to the Communist organisations, and does not affect the Bund and similar organisations, which do not make it part of their official programme to fight religion. Besides, the decision with regard to membership of the Jewish Community is left to the Communal organs themselves. The paragraphs in question do not affect the present character or competence of the Jewish Community in regard to welfare work, social protection, religious schools, etc. Paragraph 20 does not constitute part of the law itself, but is only one of the ways of carrying out the law. It is an attempt to regulate the question, and everything depends on the way in which it works out in practice. The ordinance was issued by the Government without any special preliminary regotiations with the Jewish organisations, which adopt various attitudes on the question, but after it had heard the views of a number of people in Jewish public life.

I can assure you most emphatically, the Minister concluded, that the Government has no intention whatever of interfering with internal Jewish affairs, and certainly it has no desire to disturb the principle of the autonomous regulation of religious and cultural questions by the Jewish community.