YESTERDAY Czechoslovakia celebrated the eighty-fourth birthday of its venerable President-for-life, Thomas Garrigues Masaryk, philosopher, life-long battier for human rights and the founder and pilot of the Czechoslovakian Republic.
In the heart of the Jews, not only of Czechoslovakia but of the world, there is an especially warm spot for President Masaryk, for he has been a friend to oppressed Jewry for almost all of his mature life. He has been a friend not as a politician, for temporary advantage, but as a statesman, when to be a friend brought stones upon his head, but he has not wavered. He is a friend today, in the face of the German terror, a friend as a man and a friend as the head of a Republic; but he was a friend way back in 1889, when an obscure person, now dead, Leopold Hilsner, was accused of ritual murder, and the young Professor Masaryk spoke up for human justice and against the blood ritual libel, a lonely, but not ineffectual, voice against the anti-Semitic clamor. In 1913, when the Mendel Beilis case came from before the court of world opinion. Thomas Masaryk was one of the most brilliant advocates on the side of Beilis, who had become a symbol for oppressed Jewry. The Czarist oppressions and the Black Hundreds pogroms did not find him silent.
He was the first head of a European state to pay an official visit to the Jewish Homeland. This was in 1927. He visited Jewish settlements, the University and various synagogues, whose rabbis made speeches of welcome. About three years later, his friendship to the cause of Zionism and his efforts and interest on behalf of the upbuilding of Palestine earned for him an inscription in the Golden Book of the Jewish National Fund and the planting of a forest in Palestine in his honor. This visit to Palestine was the cause later of philo-Semitic charges by the clericals of his own land who charged that while visiting Jewish places of worship and Jewish settlements, he had neglected to pay the slightest attention to the Christian holy places.
Friends of such consistency and holding such power as President Masaryk are rare. May he be spared for many more years to hold aloft the banner of justice, liberty and understanding.
The Palestine Economic News, issued by the American Economic Committee for Palestine, contains a fund of statistical and other interesting data concerning Palestine: Jewish aviators have established a flying club in Tel-Aviv…The Tiberias mineral springs have been declared by a Swiss engineer to be equalled by few and surpassed by none of the famous European springs in their chemical composition and suitable for curative purposes… A candy and chewing gum factory is being erected in Ramat Gan…. Two motor schooners owned by German Jewish immigrants and wholly manned by Jews ply between Haifa and other near European ports carrying produce and other wares… In Tel-Aviv, 199 building permits were issued in November for the construction of 1,229 rooms and thirty-three stores with a combined area of 37,772 square meters…. France. Poland and Bulgaria will erect permanent pavilions at the Levant Fair…. The colony of Migdal Eder, abandoned during the 1929 riots, is being rehabilitated under the name of Kfar Etzion, each family to receive twenty-five dunams of land…. A radio broadcasting station has been erected at Tel-Aviv.
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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.
