Once a year, when the government budget is discussed in the Polish Sejm, the Jewish members of the Sejm have their chance to tell the world from a parliamentary platform of the precarious position in which the three million Jews of Poland are situated. Discussing the budget, the Jewish parliamentarians utilize the general debate for injecting also the Jewish complaints.
The complaints enumerated by Dr. Thon, president of the Jewish Sejm Club, last night during the general debate on the Polish budget are not only illustrative of the despair of the Jewish population in Poland but sound like an indictment of the Polish government.
Dr. Thon in his complaints accuses the Polish government of condemning its three million Jewish citizens to complete annihilation by burdening them with taxation and by favoring the peasantry, which constitutes about sixty per cent of the entire population of Poland.
Nobody can suspect Dr. Thon of being biased against the present regime in Poland.
Certainly no such suspicion exists with regard to Rabbi Levin, the other Jewish parliamentarian, who substantiated last night from the platform of the Sejm that a million Jews in Poland have been reduced to beggary and are dependent upon charity. Rabbi Levin is a member of the Agudah party, which strongly supports the present government.
The charges made by these two Jewish leaders from the tribune of the Polish parliament against the Polish government are, therefore, something to which the Polish government must give an answer. The government has been accused openly before the world of conducting a policy of annihilating a million human beings; of starving out a million Jewish citizens; of favoring one part of the population at the expense of another; of forcing the jews, who are only ten per cent of the population, to actually cover forty per cent of the government budget by taxes.
What has the Polish government to say in its defense? The answer will be of interest not only to the Jews but to all those who are interested in humane treatment of human beings.
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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.
