A big campaign is being launched here to persuade the Government to withdraw paragraph 20 of the Jewish Community election ordinance. A new progressive organisation has been formed under the name of the United Bloc of Non-Partisan Polish Jews to fight against the Agudath Israel on a strongly polish patriotic and pro-Pilsudski programme, embracing all Jewish problems, such as the fight for the Jewish right to employment, opposition to the Compulsory Sunday Closing Law, removal of the heavy burden of taxation imposed on the Jews, extension of the Jewish school system, promotion of the work in Palestine, etc.
A protest has been lodged against the action of the District Chief in Czenstochova, who has removed Samuel Goldstein, a Mizrachist member of the Board of the Jewish Community, as well as of the City Council and President of many local philanthropic institutions from the list of members of the Electoral Commission which is to draw up the list of electors to the Jewish Communities. It is suggested that this has been done because Goldstein is an opponent of the Agudah.
The Warsaw Agudist Organisation has also lodged a protest with the Board of the Warsaw Jewish Community against the decision of the Warsaw Electoral Commission not to remove the Bundist leader, Councillor Henrik Ehrlich, and the Poale Zionist leaders, Messrs. Zerubavel and Lew, from the list of electors to the Jewish Community. The Agudah points out in its protest that these Jewish Labour leaders have publicly declared themselves to be Konfessionslos.
Councillor Ehrlich read out the formal declaration presented to the Board of the Warsaw Jewish Community in 1929, when the Bundists announced their secession from the Community, in which he declared that the aim of the Bund in the Jewish Communal Organisation was to carry on propaganda for secular and national cultural autonomy, to convert the charity activities of the Community into social aid work and to secularise the Jewish school system. The Zionist and Agudist majority, the declaration went on, make it impossible to realise these aims, and consequently the Bundist Praction is leaving the Jewish Community.
When the Warsaw Jewish Community held its first meeting immediately after its election in 1926, Councillor Ehrlich similarly read out a declaration of Bundist policy in the course of which he protested against the religious character of the statutes of the Community, insisting that it was in reality the representative body of the whole Jewish population and not only of the religious section.
About the same time Councillor Ehrlich was addressing a Conference of the Jewish Freethinkers’ Organisation in Poland, to which he explained that the Bund had entered the Jewish Community for the purpose of disrupting it from the inside.
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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.
