Jewish Suicide Record in Eastern Europe Due to Insolvency Abnormal One, Joint Distribution Committee

The record of Jewish suicide in Eastern Europe, due to insolvency, is an abnormal one, according to a report by David M. Bressler, executive member of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee ,and Joseph C. Hyman, secretary of that body, which has just been made public by the Allied Jewish Campaign. This is especially the case, they say in their report, in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia Roumania, and Transylvania, where the Jews are preponderantly the tradesmen, the merchants, shopkeepers and small industrialists of the country.

The Bressler-Hyman report is based on observations they made during a recent tour of Eastern Europe, at the request of the Joint Distribution Committee, for the purpose of studying present-day Jewish conditions on the Continent. Their tour covered nine countries, including, besides those mentioned, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, and Austria.

“The World War itself with its havoc and bloodshed, its destruction of life and property, has been succeeded throughout Europe by a War after the War, which, in its economic implications, is likely to have, for the Jews, almost as serious consequences,” the Bressler-Hyman report declares.

JEWS LOST MARKETS AFTER WAR

“In those parts of the Old Russian Empire in which the Jews lived, they had been the merchants, the factors in commercial intercourse, the shippers, the concessionaires, the middlemen, carrying on in a large measure the domestic and a considerable part of the foreign trade of Russia with its population of 180,000,000 people. With the partitions and repartitions that followed the Peace, markets were swept away; in place of open trade and commerce, new frontiers and tariffs diverting and well-nigh drying up the normal currents of trade. The Russian market was cut off by the separation of Poland and the small Border States, especially Lithuania and Latvia, with almost ruinous consequences for the Jews of the latter countries.

“The record of Jewish insolvency, bankruptcy and even suicide is a tragic and abnormal one. For the Jew in Eastern Europe the War is by no means over. The new governments, with very few exceptions, have been and are increasingly pursuing the policy of strengthening the private financial institutions and businesses of the predominant nationalities and of building up their strength, with resulting disadvantage to the other elements of the population. Jews have been deprived of many licenses and concessions formerly enjoyed by them; they have been refused employment on public works and operations except to a negligible degree; with the rarest of exceptions, they do not hold public office or enjoy civic employment. The growth of consumers’ cooperatives of non-Jews in Poland, Lithuania, Roumania, etc., has been openly favored by Government banks and semi-official financial institutions, while the Jewish co-operatives and loan banks receive little support from these sources.

MUST BE AIDED

“Our hopes that we could, within a very short period, leave Eastern European Jewry to carry its own burden are in our opinion, in no wise justified. For some time to come, and while the Jews of Poland and the border countries are readjusting their lives and their economic structure to the new system of nationalities, tariff wars, new boundaries, large scale production, government monopolies, and changed markets—a hard and lengthy process, we fear, fraught with much suffering—we shall have to lend them our hands, our strength, and at least modestly, our substance.”