The policy of Jewish abstention from the elections to the Greek Senate as a protest against the segregration of the Jewish voters in a separate Jewish Electoral College has broken down and the Jewish population has decided to take an active part in the elections. M. Asher Mallah, President of the Greek Zionist Federation and a leading member of the Salonica Jewish Community, is nominated as the candidate of the Venizelos (Government) party. The Communist party has chosen the former Jewish Deputy Soulam as its candidate.
The elections to the Senate, the first in Greece since 1862, are fixed for March 3rd. The Jews of Salonica, voting in their Electoral College, will form a separate constituency, with the right of electing one Senator.
The abstention movement was launched by the Jewish anti-Venizelists and the Communists. All the members of the Jewish Communal Council, however, were opposed to abstention, fearing that it would be detrimental to the interests of the Jews of Salonica, by repeating the experience of the elections of 1923, when the Jewish separate Electoral College was first created. Although the absention was almost complete, 25 votes cast in the Jewish Electoral College were sufficient to return to the Chamber four candidates who represented no organized body of opinion.
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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.
