Five hundred Jewish families which have been forced to flee from Germany on account of the Hitler terror will be admitted into Uruguay as the reresult of a special decree by Dr. Gabriel Terra, President of the Republic of Uruguay.
Dr. Terra’s decree is significant in the light of the fact that Uruguay, like most of the other American nations, has, because of unemployment and the economic crisis, very strict anti-immigration laws, and doubly so as a moral victory for South American Jewry. However, when the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society of Montevideo appealed to the government for permission to bring into the country a number of German-Jewish families whom the society promised to establish, the government’s answer took the form of the president’s decree.
A campaign to raise 300,000 Uruguayan pesos, the money to be used in colonizing the German refugees, has been begun. However, since the Jewish population of Uruguay numbers only about 20,000, it is probable that the larger Jewish institutions will have to contribute most of the sum. Most of the work of colonization will be carried on by the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society, which is financed by the ICA (Jewish Colonization Association).
But even before the first refugee has come, an anti-Semitic grumbling against the decree admitting him is beginning to be heard. Those principally guilty in this matter are El Imparcial and La Tribuna Popular, two influential newspapers. El Imparcial is a Catholic newspaper, virtually the official Hitlerite organ here. La Tribuna Popular is a generally reactionary paper unfriendly to foreigners and largely responsible for the anti-immigration laws. La Tribuna views the government’s decree permitting the entry of five hundred German-Jewish families as an autonomous act abrogating the anti-immigration laws.
The campaign which both newspapers are carrying on is demagogical to an extreme and is, of course, having considerable effect upon those who are subjected to it, for most of the Uruguayan people know little about Jews and Jewish affairs.
A counteraction to the campaign of the anti-Semitic newspapers was begun by the Uruguay Day, Yiddish newspaper published in Montevideo. Its editorials insisting that something be done immediately led to the founding of Vos Hebrea (The Jewish Voice), a newspaper printed in Spanish to carry on a quiet but determined rebuttal of the arguments of the anti-Semitic press.
The local protest committee against the persecution of Jews in Germany keeps in close touch with the similar committee in Buenos Aires. When the Montevideo committee arranged a protest meeting the German diplomatic representative did everything possible to prevent the meeting from taking place. It was, however, held, and was an effective moral demonstration attended by representatives of various governmental departments, all of whom expressed their sympathy for the unfortunate German Jews. A sum of money was also collected to help establish refugee German Jews in Palestine.
### blue eyes that—strange as it may seem—Palestinian children seem to be born with and Palestinians of long standing seem to acquire.
His is the vigilant, belligerent attitude. Near the colony where he is lies an Arab village, and he is always doubtful about tomorrow, but never afraid.
“There will be peace someday, won’t there?” I said. “Real peace?”
“Keep on hoping,” he answered.
“Isn’t understanding bound to begin?”
“When we will have a majority in Palestine, there will be understanding.”
WHAT HE DOESN’T LIKE
And it is not only in regard to the Arabs that he is so. He has no more friendship for the old, becurled, velvet-hatted Jews who guard the supposedly holy places of the land, and beg alms for their crumbling institutions. The places they guard interest him, because he knows something about archaeology, but they resented his sacreligious kicking of the stones as he went around with us, and would just as soon that he and his kind didn’t exist, which compliment he returns wholeheartedly.
Nor does he like the people who live in cooperatives, and retain a part of the organization of private property. And as for the small capitalists around Petach Tikvah, who hire Arab labor. . . !
Mordecai is a bus driver on the highways of Palestine, which means that he is one of the hundred and seventy owners of the bus system Eged, one of the cooperatives of the Histadruth.
Mordecai has lived in Palestine since he was four years old, and he is twenty-seven now. He speaks Arabic even better than Hebrew.
At every official stop on the long ride from Haifa to Jerusalem, where Arab policemen had any examination to make, he was met with smiles and friendliness. The drivers of the Arab buses that passed seemed######from the riots of 1921,” he said, “and in 1929 I spent three months in jail, but they’re people, just as we are, and we mustn’t forget it.”
FRIENDLY EGYPTIAN ARAB
Abdul is an Egyptian Arab, a conductor on the trains that run to Kantara, so that he spends as much time on Palestinian soil as on Egyptian soil.
He is a poet, in his way, and says that he once wrote a long poem about Tel Aviv, which he loves. In the poem he talks about the beautiful Jewish girls of Tel Aviv.
“But tell me,” he said, “why do Jews pay six piastres for a package of cigarettes to a Jew, and refuse to pay three piastres for the same cigarettes to an Arab? And why do they refuse to hire Arab labor?”
“It isn’t so,” I argued. “Union Arab labor and union Jewish labor are in close contact; it’s only cheap Arab labor that is objected to, and you know that cheap labor should be eliminated as well as I do. The standard of living has been raised, you know that, too. Even the fields are better cultivated. . . .”
“Yes, but what is the use of knowing how to cultivate the land better when the Arab has no land left to cultivate?”
“There is enough land for everybody, enough cultivatable land.”
“There should be union,” he admitted, voluntarily. “We are cousins, you and I. We should know how to live together. But tell me, why do you believe England? Don’t you know what she wants. . . .?”
### ately wrote to the editor of the paper and rebuked him for his assumption that she had ever deserted the Jewish faith.
“I most emphatically resent the unwarrantable assumption in your issue of September 5, that I have deserted the faith of my fathers,” the Countess wrote. “Will you please contradict that unfounded statement in your next issue? I am, as I have ever been all my life, a staunch and practicing Jewess, far too proud of my race not to feel extremely indignant at the slur you have tried to cast on me.”
The Countess, who was 75 years old when she died, was noted in Ireland as a writer and speaker of great ability. In 1910, the freedom of the City of Kilkenny was conferred upon her. A philanthropist in the widest sense of the word, she played a prominent part in Irish welfare work and in the cultural life of the nation.
She was vice-president of the Union of Jewish Women, vice-president of the Montefiore House School for Jewish Girls, and closely associated with the Jews’ Temporary Shelter, the Jewish Convalescent Home and the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women as well as many other community activities.
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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.
