The Nazi authorities in Cracow have closed down all Jewish schools and Zionist offices, including the Palestine Emigration Bureau, according to a reliable report reaching Jewish organizations in Paris today.
A Jewish students’ home, the report said, has been converted into a house of prostitution for German soldiers. The report added that Jewish women were being compelled to pose in the nude for Nazi photographers and that the authorities had specified that the 200 women supplied daily by the Jewish Community for forced labor must be young college students.
A warning that no foreign currency should be sent into Nazi Poland for relief purposes was contained in the report, which advised that relief shipments be confined to food, clothing and medicaments. The report revealed that the Cracow Jewish Hospital, considered one of the finest in Poland, had been completely looted by the Nazis.
Herr Siebert, Gestapo Commissar for Jewish Affairs in Cracow, who has made his headquarters in the Jewish Community building, was said in the report to make a practice of ordering groups of Jews to perform kosher slaughter and other Jewish rituals in front of Nazi cameramen. The films will be used to create the impression that the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland enjoy religious liberty, while as a matter of fact all the rituals shown have long been forbidden by the Nazis.
Economically, the report said, the Jews in Cracow are completely ruined. Jewish enterprises which still manage to exist were said to be under supervision of “Aryan” commissars, mostly Ukrainians. All display signs stating: “This shop is under supervision of an Aryan commissar,” but even these, according to the report, are destined for early elimination.
Other reports reaching Jewish organizations here said that Nazi Governor-General Hans Frank has ordered all Catholic priests to submit lists of all Jewish converts during the past 100 years. It was also reported that the Gestapo agents in Radom informed the Jewish Community it could have some 120 Scrolls of the Law taken from synagogues returned upon payment of 100,000 marks.
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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.
