News Brief

(Jewish Telegraphic Agency Mail Service)

A new organization named in memory of Petlura has been founded here by the representatives of the Great Ukrainian Political Emigration, for the purpose of collecting documents for presentation on behalf of the Petlura side in the trial against Sholom Schwartzbard for the assassination of Petlura and of calling witnesses to meet the contentions of the Schwartzbard defence. The organization will further raise funds to pay the expenses of the trial, to maintain Petlura’s family and to erect a monument over Petlura’s grave in the Paris cemetery. It will also watch all reports appearing in the press issued by the Schwartzbard defence and will counter them with reports for the Petlura side.

The Organization will collect materials relating to Petlura’s life and work for publication in the press, in special leaflets, almanacs and biographies. It will also organize popular lectures, found schools, libraries, publishing companies and other educational institutions in the name of Petlura, as well as endow scholarships in Petlura’s name at various Universities.

The Ukrainian press throughout Galicia has simultaneously started virulent anti-Semitic agitation. The Lemberg organ of the Ukrainian Nationalists, “Dilo,” which has made itself notorious by its recent anti-Semitic attitude, writes:

“Every affair in which a Jew figures is sure to be turned into a national Jewish question, a matter for all Jews, for the wole of world-Jewry. A Jewish usurer, let us say, drives a poor Ukrainian peasant to beggary and if the peasant in desperation turns on the Jew and takes revenge on him the Jews at once raise an outery that it was an anti-semitic attack on a defenceless Jew.

“But if a Jew commits an act of vengeance, an unjustified act of vengeance, like the assassination of Petlura after the lapse of seven years, then it is also a Jewish national affair. The murdered man is immediately held up by the Jews as a beast in human form and the murderer as a noble idealist, a splendid citizen, a man possessed of all the virtues. It doesn’t matter what party he belongs to, whether he is a believing Jew or an atheist, it is all one to the Jews.

“The Jews,” the paper proceeds, “are not content with the glorification of Schwartzbard. They are making great preparations for the trial. His advocate, M. Torres, has put himself in touch with the Soviet authorities in Moscow and Charkoff to obtain materials relating to the pogroms. At the same time, the journalist Lekash has gone to the Ukraine to make investigations on the spot. The Jews are planning by the issue of pamphlets and an active press campaign to influence French public opinion for the trial. Lekash has been in various places and, according to the Jewish press, has collected a great deal of material regarding Petlura’s part in the pogroms, his responsibility for the pogroms, his private fortune and the part played in the Ukraine by the French Mission. The Jewish journalists are scouring the cemeteries of the Ukraine to find Jewish graves. Will they also,” the paper concludes, “stop to look upon the densely crowded graves in which lie tens of thousands of Ukrainians who were done to death by such a Jewish institution as the Tcheka?”

Three public grammar schools have been rented for after-school use by the Jewish Education Committee of Chicago, to provide additional facilities for the establishment of Hebrew schools.