British Jewry is to provide material assistance to enable the 12,000 Jews of Poland to “survive this winter,” Greville Janner, MP, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said this week.
He was speaking after a visit to Poland with his wife as a guest of the Polish Ministry of Religious Affairs. Only apples and potatoes, he said, stood between the Polish people and starvation and British Jewry wanted to help the Jews of Warsaw in the same way that the Caritas organization assumed responsibility for Catholics.
Nevertheless, Janner was full of praise for the attitudes of the Polish government to the remnant of a Jewish community which once numbered three-and-a-half million. He paid similar compliments to the governments of Czechoslovakia and Hungary which he also visited last week.
In Hungary, Janner was a member of a delegation from the European Section of the World Jewish Congress which spent three days in Budapest as guests of the 80,000-strong Jewish community. His separate visits to Czechoslovakia and Poland were conducted at the invitation of the Religious Affairs Ministries of those countries.
SUMS UP IMPRESSIONS
Summing up his impressions, Janner told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency he was “surprised and deeply impressed by the way the governments of all three countries help the Jewish communities to maintain their cultural and religious life which in some ways our own community could well learn from.” “For these countries’ Jews, the main priority was human contact with ourselves,” Janner said. He was the first head of the Anglo-Jewish community to visit all three countries and believed the visit had “opened a window.” He hoped to pay similar visits to East Germany and Bulgaria.
In Hungary, the WJC delegation visited the Rabbinical Seminary in Budapest where it met students from East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. Janner described the 20,000 Jews of Czechoslovakia (all that is left of 300,000 Jews from before the war) as “ageing, proud and well looked after.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
