Although the results of the Saar plebiscite will not be made known until tomorrow, it nevertheless is safe to predict that whatever the results are, the situation of the Saar Jews will remain hopeless.
There are seventeen Jewish communities in the Saar today. How many of them will remain a year from today is not easy to foretell. Those Jews who are in a position to emigrate from the Saar are already leaving for other lands. Those who will remain will hardly be enabled to maintain their status as a community.
Those of the Jews in the Saar who do not leave the district will find themselves in a far graver situation than the Jews in Germany. There is no taxation in the Saar for the maintenance of Jewish institutions, as in Germany. Consequently the Jewish institutions in the Saar will be the first to be liquidated.
Of the 5,000 Jews in the Saar region not less than 4,000 have no means to emigrate. Only about 200 families have sufficient capital to be admitted into other countries.
The efforts which many Jews in the Saar will now make to sell out their property within the twelve months of security guaranteed to them by the Franco-German agreement will hardly bring any results. Reports from the Saar already indicate that the local population is not in a hurry to buy any property from Jews, since it knows that the Jews will have to leave the country anyway within twelve months.
The fact that the League of Nations failed to provide security for the Saar Jews for more than twelve months may perhaps serve to convince the voluble detractors of Jewry that their theory that the Jews are dominating world politics is nothing but a baseless myth. How different the situation of the Jews in the Saar would be today if “international Jewry” actually wielded any influence in international politics!
The appeal which Rabbi Ruelf, Chief Rabbi of Saar-bruecken, issued on the eve of the Saar plebiscite, urging the world to raise its voice for the Jews in the Saar, is a direct indictment of the League of Nations — the very same League which anti-Semites all over the world so often accuse of being “an instrument in Jewish hands.”
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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.
