Polish Jewry Spent Bitter Year Fending Anti-semitic Onslaught

the two together, the strongest being the fact that forty to fifty per cent of Palestine immigrants are from Poland. (Statistics show that the natural increase of the Polish Jewish population is diverted to Palestine.) As a result, the Palestine office in Warsaw is the institution foremost in the consciousness of Polish Jewry.

Naturally, Palestine immigration restrictions aroused great disappointment in Poland, but the protest movement which might have developed to great strength failed to do so because of the lack of unity in Zionist circles.

Party strife in Palestine also was reflected in Poland, and the Stavsky trial growing out of the Arlosoroff murder aroused particular notice because Stavsky is a Polish Jew. Very often, indeed the difference of opinion between the Revisionists and the Laborites became so sharp in various places that clashes, sometimes, bloody, resulted. Attempts to create peace in the ranks of the Zionists were unavailing.

Nahum Sokolow, president of the Zionist World Organization and of the Jewish Agency, spent three months in Poland, and succeeded in interesting a number of politically influential persons in a pro-Palestine committee, while his presence and activities were made the occasion of a number of pro-Jewish utterances on the part of government officials.

Naturally, the tragedy of the German Jews occupied the minds of the Polish Jews often, and, frequently, to the exclusion of everything else. The boycott movement became widespread despite the fact that German agents flooded the country with tempting offers. A few Jews, as in other countries, remained outside the action, but received their due from public opinion. The whole boycott movement was jeopardized for a time by the Polish-German non-aggression pact and the trade agreement, but the Jewish group was not stumped for long.

In connection with these negotiations, German propaganda minister Paul Joseph Goebbels visited Poland just when the Nara excesses were at their height. His visit aroused much bitterness, the Yiddish newspapers all greeting him with the same slogan on an otherwise blank front page.

Unfortunately, the relief activities on behalf of the German Jews did not produce the wished-for results in Poland, nor is the economic situation alone to blame for this fact. Visits by League High Commissioner James McDonald and Norman Bentwich in connection with their work on the League’s Refuge Commission also were less successful than might have been anticipated.