American reaction to persecution in Germany was today evidencing itself increasingly in an intensified movement to aid German Jews to find homes and resistance to racial and anti-Semitic doctrines in this country.
The annual assembly of the Jewish National Fund last night at the Hotel Astor accepted a $5,000,000 share in the United Palestine Appeal’s $10,000,000 quota, urging in a resolution the immediate settlement of 40,000 refugees in Palestine.
The Jewish Labor Committee urged its 500,000 constituents to contribute a day’s wages to help German Jews. A campaign to raise additional funds for the American ORT Federation to provide practical aid to refugees through immediate trade and agricultural training was announced tonight by Max D. Steuer, following a dinner at the Hotel Pierre for 50 Jewish leaders. The Federation of Polish Jews in America announced that the first half of a $50,000 emergency fund to aid Polish Jews deported from Germany had been transmitted by the World Federation of Polish Jews Abroad in Amsterdam. Victor F. Ridder, publisher of the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung und Herold agreed to serve as treasurer of a committee sponsoring a benefit football game for refugees at Ebbets Field on Dec. 3.
The Harvard University Corporation voted 20 $500 scholarships for German refugees, with a proviso that each be supplemented by $500 for living expenses raised by an under-graduate committee on refugee students. President James B. Conant expressed satisfaction with campaigns by students at Harvard and other American institutions of higher education to raise funds "to take care of capable students who are fleeing the terrors of a dictatorship." A move to liberalize American immigration laws to aid refugee children was made by Representative Emanuel Celler of New York who announced in Washington he would introduce an amendment at the next Congressional session waiving all quota restrictions for German and Austrian children whose parents have become victims of Nazi oppression.
The challenge of Nazi racialism to the United States was taken up by church and other groups. State Senator Thomas M. Burke introduced a bill in the Massachusetts Legislature which would prohibit the slandering or libeling of any racial group, declaring that his State should clean its house while protesting persecution abroad. The bill provides for penalties up to $?,000 fine and a year’s imprisonment.
A national inter-racial conference sponsored by the Protestant Episcopal Church on the University of Chicago campus closed tonight with an address by Rabbi G. George Fox, president of the Chicago Rabbinical Association. The 350 delegates had heard Charles P. Taft of Cincinnati, son of the late President Taft, warn that the church must combat racial prejudice lest situations prevalent in Europe arise in America.
A Catholic warning against racialism was given here last night by Father John LaFarge, the writer, who has just returned from a six-month visit to Europe, addressing a dinner at the Town Hall Club sponsored by the Catholic Interracial Council and other Catholic groups. Suggesting that the whole racist idea in Europe had no aim but to express spite against the Jews, he warned that American racism was a "pale but venomous elder cousin" of Nazi racism. In Montreal, Rodriguez Cardinal Villeneuve, Archbishop of Quebec, declared in an address that Germany’s anti-Semitic campaign was "a striking example of what a godless government will commit when it reverts to paganism."
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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.
