A violent attack on the Jews in Palestine, who have been praised by members of the Polish Cabinet for their hospitality to Polish refugees, is published today in Mysl Polska, organ of Polish extremists issued in London.
(Private information from Palestine which reached New York this week reveals that Polish residents in the all-Jewish city of Tel Aviv have provoked anti-Jewish riots which forced the mayor of the city to issue an order forbidding Polish soldiers to appear on the streets of Tel Aviv for three days. During the disturbances, the brother-in-law of Berl Katznelson, noted Jewish labor leader and editor of the daily newspaper “Davar,” was killed by a Polish soldier. Other private reports from Palestine reveal that a Polish school-boy in Tel Aviv stabbed a Jewish boy and that Poles made an attempt to set fire to the Beth Am in Tel Aviv, which is the largest Jewish public gathering place in the city, but were caught by the police.)
Taking issue with a recent statement made by Wladyslaw Banaczyk, vice-president of the Polish National Council, who lauded the Jews in Palestine for their loyalty to Poland and the hospitality extended by the Yishuv to Polish refugees who are now living in Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, Haifa and other Palestine cities, the writer in Mysl Polska, attempts, in a two-page article, to discredit the pro-Polish feelings of the Polish Jews there. “I have been to Palestine and found no such feelings,” he declares. “The Jews there apeak Polish for commercial reasons only.”
Polish Jews in Palestine are “cheating and profiteering,” the author of the anti-Semitic article, Alexander Zawisza, says. All assertions of alleged friendly relations between Jews and Poles “are more official talk,” he asserts. He warns that the Polish Jews in Palestine are awaiting the opportunity of returning to Poland. The same issue of Mysl Polska also carries another anti-Semitic article stating that “it is high time to put an end to the legend of unhappy Jewish life in pre-war Poland.”
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