The way in which the police in Bessarabia stop at nothing in their efforts to create cases of alleged Communism in the Province, in order to demonstrate to the Central Government in Bucharest that the Communist menace is so serious that there must be no reduction in their numbers and no relaxation of the drastic powers which they now possess, and which are used to terrorise the population, is illustrated by the savage treatment of a Jewish family named Beilis in the Bessarabian town of Ackerman (where one of the great battles of the Crimean War was fought), the Ackerman “Posta” reports. On the night of February 16th., it says, five soldiers came to the house in which the Beilis family live and took away the mother, Esther Beilis, and two of her boys, Motel, 16 years of age, and Meyer, 15 years of age, kept them for three days under arrest, and tortured them in order to extort from them a confession that they are Communists.
There is tremendous excitement and indignation in AcKerman over the outrage, and the President of the Ackerman Jewish Community, Moses Hellman, and-the Rabbi of Ackerman, Rabbi Berger, have intervened with the authorities protesting against this unjustified police persecution and declaring that the accused have no Communist affiliations.
Dr. Lupu, the leader of the Independent Peasants’ Party, and a former Minister of the Interior, will raise the matter in Parliament.
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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.
