A day or two ago the New York Times carried a small stick of type concerning some 318 young East European Jews who were sailing around the Mediterranean on board the steamer Velos. Every country the steamer touched at refused these young Jews admittance. They were as effectively quarantined on board the Velos as though they were lepers.
That great, vaunted haven of refuge for the Jewish people, Palestine, headed the list of those countries which looked at these men without a country and consigned them to the fate of the open sea.
TREATED LIKE SCUM
Here were 318 young people, courageous, clear-eyed, resolute, seeking to remake their own future with their hands. Here were 318 lost souls, disowned by everyone and treated for all the world as if they were carriers of the plague. Through their own resolution they had escaped the murderous hellholes of the pogrom countries of Eastern Europe. Wandering from port to port had exhausted all of their available funds. The ship’s captain finally looked upon them as so many accursed pariahs. Yet here were 318 fine-souled Jewish boys and girls who were asking nothing from the world but the right to live a clean decent life on Jewish soil.
It is not only the fate of these 318 unfortunate pieces of human driftwood that should burn like fire into our consciousness, but the fate of the hundreds of thousands whom they represent. Who is doing anything for these people? Whose duty is it to do something? Are they to be consigned to the sharks because those who sit in the seats of power are oblivious to all else but their own well-fed bellies?
SCREEN OF VERBIAGE
How can any sane Zionist view the ugly fate of these 318 eager-eyed young Jewish boys and girls and continue to waste himself, listening to the fine-spun talks and hair-splitting adjectives of those who speak for Jewry?
These leaders who bask smugly in the limelight of attention, unable to visualize a creative, bold purpose, attempt to becloud everything else with a heavy smoke screen of words. Is a lone correspondent like myself, with my demand for simple action, as they claim a menace to Jewry, or is the true menace the acquiescent, temporizing, stuffed-shirt attitude which these poor 318 nameless ones are acquainted with only too well?
Why, in the face of these 318 unfortunates, are oratorical, placating phrases to be regarded as holy? The generation to which I belong regards nothing as holy except an action and a result which is acceptable to us and which will bear the test of rigid examination. When we read a balance sheet we are not interested in a few items which may be distorted into almost any meaning. We are only interested in the last line, as to whether this is in red or in black We want to know whether the whole Jewish structure is going bankrupt, as we suspect, and we feel that we have a justifiable right to ask some pertinent ques-
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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.
