White House Receives B’nai B’rith Petition

A petition bearing a quarter of a million names, urging President Roosevelt to intervene with Germany “in accordance with the traditions of our country,” in behalf of the persecuted Jews there was presented to the White House today.

The petition and the long list of names, bound in fourteen volumes, was presented to Marvin Maclntyre, secretary to the president, by a delegation headed by former Senator Alfred M. Cohen, president of the B’nai B’rith, under whose auspices the signatures were collected.

The petition requests the President to express to Germany the distress which persecution of the Jews has caused to Americans and to the civilized worid in general. Others in the delegation which called at the White House were Congressman A. J. Sabath, of Chicago, who introduced the delegation to Mr. Maclntyre; Dr. I. M. Rubinow, executive secretary of the B’nai B’rith, and Maurice D. Rosenberg, Washington representative of the order.

The majority of signatures to the petition are of non-Jews and represent a cross-section of leading American citizens.

THE PETITION

“Your Excellency:

“I have the honor to deliver into your hands as the representative of his excellency the President of the United States, a document prepared by the B’nai B’rith bearing the signatures of more than a quarter of a million American citizens, followers of various faiths, in all stations of life in every section of the country.

“I believe the men and women whose names appear on these sheets truly represent in overwhelming degree their fellow country-men in relation to the content thereof, the essence of which is a reaffirmation of those simple doctrines which are the bedrock of our republic: The inalienable right of all who obey the law to live in safety, to worship freely, or to abstain from worship as each individual conscience impels, and to engage in such occupations as they may adopt and enjoy the fruits thereof.

“Happily these elementary principles of justice are acknowledged by all peoples worthy of inclusion in the circle of enlightened nations.

“Shocked, therefore, are these petitioners by the policy of the present German government in reference to the Jews in that country. If the word of German officials be accepted at par that the lives that have been sacrificed and the homes that have been wrecked during the past year by a revival of time dishonored cries of hatred, were an unavoidable concomitant of a revolution through which the country has passed, what can be said to justify the program of which the government boasts to demote from citizenship six hundred thousand people into a class of undesirables destined to be victims of bigotry and hate, many of them probably to be driven by desperation into outlawry–can it be that with fiendish ingenuity such a condition is in the minds of the persecutors–of barring Jews from the professions; hampering them in business; limiting most narrowly the admission of youths into higher schools and making life for children in the primary schools a perfect hell on earth by setting them apart for derision, scorn and contempt of their teachers and non-Jewish mates, while filling their bodies with fear and their souls with terror?.

“These are only a few of the undenied degradations from which the Jews in Germany are suffering. What is their offense? They are Jews; this is in the twentieth century.

“Against these outrages right-minded people everywhere are protesting. Speech and press wherever free unite in condemning this plot on civilization of our time Hope for its removal rests on a quickened public conscience manifesting itself so unmistakingly that the German people, themselves grossly wronged, may come to realize the injustice done in their name not alone to Jews but in their government’s treatment of the Jews, to all mankind.

“To help fulfill that hope these volumes of petitions are entrusted to you, sir, to be presented to the beloved President of our country, so that with an accompanying note written in the spirit of fairness and with the vision for which our President is so worthily distinguished, they may be forwarded to the German government.”