Twenty leading Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were executed recently by the Nazis in reprisal for hunger riots during which crowds of starving Jews demonstrated in the ghetto streets, according to reliable information received here today.
The information was received by Theodore Meisels, whose 60-year-old father, Dr. Jacob Meisels, was among the victims executed. A descendant of a famous rabbinical family, Dr. Meisels embraced the Christian religion after he was graduated from the medical college of Vienne University. During World War I he attained the rank of General as organizer of the medical services of the Austrian army. Mobilized by the Nazis at the beginning of the present war as a doctor without military rank and sent to the Polish front, Dr. Meisels informed his superior officers that he prefer preferred to return to Judaism and to share the fate of all other Jews, whereupon he was discharged and sent to the Warsaw ghetto.
Dr. Meisels had been asked several times by influential Italian friends to leave the ghetto and come to Italy. He refused, however, to leave the ghetto, where he continued to practice helping Jewish institutions in combatting infectious diseases arising from starvation and giving medical aid to the needy Jewish population.
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