Declaring that experiences of the past few years have taught the Jewish people to be surprised at nothing, Dr. Nahum Sokolow in a second speech delivered at the opening session tonight reviewed the situation in world Jewry and in Zionism.
“Interest is still focused principally on the hardpressed Jewry of Germany,” he declared, adding that “the campaign against Judaism in Germany is not slackening, but on the contrary is being intensified.”
“We have not the slightest intention,” the veteran Zionist leader declared, “of taking up the time of the Zionist Congress with German, French, English or any other foreign politics. Zionism has no desire to interfere as such in international politics.
The objects for which Zionism strives and which as a Jewish renaissance it has to cherish are of permanent worth, and therefore far too valuable to be misused as a pawn in the game of another nation’s current policy for the attainment of a fleeting advantage.”
He emphasized further that “we have no inducement to occupy ourselves in a Zionist Congress, from the standpoint whether of international or of German politics, with what is called Nazism. In respect of the situation in Germany,” he declared, “we are interested here only in two points which are in themselves non-political. The first is world peace, for which we all long, and the second is the war which German anti-Semitism is carrying on against the Jews of Germany and against Judaism the world over.”
Speaking on the question of international peace, Dr. Sokolow stressed the point that “not only on sentimental grounds, but also on material grounds is peace an urgent necessity for the Jewish people, than which no people on earth has suffered more from the horrors of war.”
“The ideas of outlawing war,” he said, “of disarmament, of the peaceful settlement of all disputes, of the assembling of all nations in a league of equal members, in spite of many deep disappointments, are more highly prized in Jewish public opinion than in any other.
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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.
