A big campaign on behalf of the unemployed is being carried on in the country, the “Selbsthilf” (self-aid), organ of the Jewish Loan-Aid Societies in Poland writes. Jews contribute to the funds for this campaign through the comp### additional taxation, it says, and the District Governors’ Committees are also collecting donations from the Jewish population. Will Jews benefit in any way by this campaign? The term unemployed can be interpreted in such a way that no Jews will be able to obtain any help. That is, for instance, what the District Governors’ Committee in Vilna is doing. It has excluded from unemployed benefit 120 Jewish labourers who were engaged in loading timber, because they were not registered in the Sick Fund. There are also those large numbers of Jews who are not strictly unemployed, but are shopkeepers, traders, etc. who are completely destitute and have no possibility of earning a livelihood. In Cracow the unemployed fund issues 20 groschens per child to the schools to provide them with food. Why is it not done in Warsaw, Lemberg, and Pinsk, where children are fainting at their desks for hunger?
It is necessary, the paper says, to call a Conference of the representatives of the Jewish unemployed committees in the provincial parts of the country, to consider how the State Relief Committees for the Unemployed can be made to realise the special needs of the distressed Jewish population.
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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.
