“save the Jews in Roumania!” Organ of German Jews Appeals

(Jewish Telegraphic Agency Mail Service)

“Save the Jews of Roumania!” urges “an appeal to the conscience of the world,” published by the “C. V. Zeitung,” the organ of the Central Verein Deutscher Staatsburger Judischen Glaubens.

Describing the situation in Roumania, the appeal says, “Against what is the Roumanian Government defending itself? Against the complaint that it has permitted pogroms. If by the word ‘pogrom’ we are to understand organized mass-murders, like those at the time of the Beilis affair, then we must say definitely that such pogroms have not yet occurred in Roumania. This does not make matters any better for the Roumanian Government, because through the propaganda conducted in its own press, it is playing into the hands of the Roumanian anti-Semites, the so-called Christian League for National Defence.

“The publications of this League inciting to the murder of Jews, are not banned by the Government. The Jews are accused of ritual murder, they are designated as mortal enemies of the Roumanian people, and are threatened that they will have to drink their own blood.

“The ‘Swastika,’ the official organ of the Christian League in the district of Galatz, states: ‘Accursed people, people of thieves and deceivers, people without life and without fatherland. Their last refuge will be a vast solitude in a wilderness in which they will be quietly buried.’

“The Bucharest organ of the League publishes a declaration that ‘the Jew, the slaughterer of mankind and the cause of dissension within Christendom, is with his notorious bestiality destroying the Holy Cross and that he, always and only he, has persecuted and beaten Christ because He stands for faith, righteousness and truth.’

“The ‘Carpatii’, the organ of the League in Ploesti, publishes an open incitement to the murder of Jews, headed ‘Kill’. ‘Our National pride,’ it says, ‘demands that we should destroy and kill all those who are undermining our people and our state. No one has the right to hold our hand when the existence of the Roumanian people is at stake.’

“A cartoon published by the Christian League shows the Jew as a spider sucking the blood of a Roumanian peasant.

“This sort of propaganda,” the appeal continues, “might be ignored if the Roumanian Government were taking any action to counter it, if the Roumanian penal code were observed and the people spreading this propaganda were punished. But nothing of this kind is being done. On the contrary the Government has no intention of staying the hand of these defenders of the Roumanian people and is even assisting them by the propaganda of its own press organs which, after the method of the anti-Semites, make the Jews responsible for everything that is bad in Roumania. The Government, especially the Minister of the Interior, M. Goga, whose work it should be to suppress such propaganda, who is posing before public opinion abroad as a philo-Semite but is actually one of the spiritual leaders of Roumanian anti-Semitism, must not be surprised if this propaganda bears fruit. If Jews are hurled out of moving trains; if the windows of Jewish shops are smashed; if Jews are attacked in the open streets and beaten; if Jewish students at the Roumanian Universities are maltreated and ejected from the lecture-rooms and laboratories; if, in a word, there is a pogrom atmosphere in Roumania.

“This pogrom feeling exists. Anyone who comes to Roumania and sees and hears will be convinced of this. If the Roumanian Government is indignant at the charge that it has permitted pogroms, it is in the right only in so far as pogroms have not yet-with the emphasis on the yet-taken place. But from the excesses which have already taken place to pogroms-that is, to massacre of Jews-is only one more step. We hope that this step will not take place. The condition for this is that the Government, instead of raising protests against the protests coming in from abroad and instead of forcing the Jews of the country by threats to deny what has taken place (denials which have not been made and probably will never be made) must decide to deal with matters at its own door. If there are continued anti-Jewish excesses or excesses in intensified form-which according to the situation in the towns is very possible-the complicity of the Roumanian Government will be proved beyond question.”