Solving Minorities Problem in Roumania: Head of Newly-created Minorities Department in Government Pr

The Under-Secretary of State for Minorities Affairs, Dr. Rudolph Brandsch, one of the leaders of the German Minority Party in Roumania, for whom the Jorga Government created the new Government Department for Minorities, declared to-day in a reception to press representatives that his Secretariat is proceeding to make an intensive study of the problems of the minorities in Roumania, with a view to settling the most important of these problems in the interests of the minorities and of the Roumanian State. The new Parliament which has just been elected, he said, will have to deal during the present session with new laws which he is going to introduce to amend the existing Citizenship Law in order to solve the problem of the Staatenlose, and to amend the existing Education Law in respect to private schools, by giving more extensive rights to the schools of the minorities.

When Dr. Brandsch was appointed in April to the new Government Department of Minorities, the members of the then Club of Jewish Deputies, most of whom have been re-elected to Parliament as the representatives of the Jewish Party (Dr. Mayer Ebner, Dr. Theodore Fischer, and Dr. Joseph Fischer have been re-elected, only Advocate Michael Landau falling to secure re-election. Dr. Max Diamant has been elected, however, as a fourth Deputy of the Jewish Party, so that there are in the new Parliament, as in the last, four members of the Jewish Club of Deputies), expressed to the Premier, Professor Jorga, while on a deputation to him, their satisfaction at the appointment of Dr. Brandsch, adding their hope that the Government would set up within the framework of his Secretariat of National Minorities a special Department for Jewish Affairs under the direction of an elected representative of the Jewish population.

Dr. Filderman, the President of the Union of Roumanian Jews, also declared at the same time, in an interview with the J.T.A. representative, that M. Brandsch’s person was a guarantee that he would engage in a proper and beneficial policy towards the minorities, adding, however, that he is definitely opposed to a special minorities statute, which he would regard as a misfortune. The rights of the minorities, he said, can be very well maintained within the framework of the existing laws, and develop with them, while to fix them in the form of a special statute would cause dissatisfaction among all sections, and for the minorities it would be a hindrance to their development.

In January, not for the first time, an effort was made by the Jewish Deputies to obtain an amendment of the existing education law by a bill introduced by Deputy Landau bearing the signature of thirty Deputies backing it, aiming to provide more extensive rights for private schools, abolishing in particular the present restriction against pupils taking examinations in their mother tongue and providing further for the establishment of teachers’ seminaries on funds supplied by the State or by State initiative and aiming in general to improve the status of the private schools to give wider scope to the Jewish private schools, in which Yiddish or Hebrew is used as the language of instruction. The Government argument against the bill at the time was that the State did not have the money needed for the purpose.

The problem of the Staatenlose has been repeatedly raised for years past and after the message from the Throne at the opening of Parliament in January, the Club of Jewish Deputies put an interpellation demanding the regulation of the nationality question, but no reply was obtained from the Government side.