A memorandum on the Jewish position in the Saar plebiscite area was considered here today at a closed meeting of the committee appointed by the League of Nations to prepare the Saar plebiscite. Baron Pompeo Aloisi of Italy presided at the committee meeting.
The memorandum, which was submitted by the Committee of Jewish Delegations of Paris, the Joint Foreign Committee of the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, pointed out the Jewish population in the Saar numbers 4,850, or 0.6 per cent of the total population of the region.
The Council was requested to take measures for the protection of the Jewish minority during the plebiscite and after it, the memorandum citing the obligation of the League of Nations for guaranteeing protection to minorities.
Three fourths of the Jews in the Saar are descended from Jewish colonies established in the Saar during the thirteenth, fourteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the memorandum stated, adding that only one fourth of the Jews there are composed of recent immigrants.
Stating that this year the Jewish minority in the Saar is weighed down by great fear, the memorandum requested that if the plebiscite resulted in anything other than the maintenance of the status quo, then the country to which the Saar would be attached shall undertake to guarantee the protection of minorities, even before the popular will had been consulted.
The Saar region, rich industrial district detached from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, and governed by a League of Nations Commission is to vote in 1935 for one of three propositions: return to Germany, inclusion in the French Republic, or to remain under the League of Nations.
Nazis have been conducting an energetic campaign in the Saar to win over the population and are employing their customary tactics of intimidation and terrorism. Recently they realized that their tactics were injuring the Nazi cause. They thereupon organized a German Front inviting Catholics and even Jews to join. Results of the plebiscite are by no means certain as the Saar is chiefly Catholic and the Saar Catholics cannot help but see the campaign against their co-religionists in Germany.
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