World Press Digest

The New York Times reports the following in a cable received from its correspondent in Biro-Bidjan:

Gifts from many parts of the Soviet Union and even from abroad are arriving in anticipation of the first Congress of Soviets of the Jewish autonomous region of Biro-Bidjan, which will soon open here.

Biro-Bidjan, which was opened for Jewish settlement in 1928, was proclaimed an autonomous region on May 7, 1934. This until recently uninhabited bit of Siberian waste is now populated by 50,000 settlers, most of whom are Jews from the Ukraine and White Russia. It also has about 900 Jewish workers who have immigrated from Europe and America.

The Kharkov Central Telegraph Organization has sent telegraphic equipment. Workers of the Vitebsk and Kharkov garment plants have sent warm clothing for the new settlers. The Kieff biochemical plant has sent laboratory equipment for Jewish schools. The Lenin plant at Dniepropetrovk has sent a carload of iron piping.

REICH NOT FAR FROM CANNIBALISM

The London Times, in an editorial on Ludendorff, says:

For many years it has been customary for Germans of intelligence to treat General Ludendorff’s diatribes against Jews and Freemasons as harmless eccentricities. The Nazi revolution has taught them better. For once we see a prophet with honor in his own country. Statements which were once the material of libel actions are now the stock-in-trade of party leaders, propagandists, and school teachers. The General boasts that he long since said “goodbye to Christianity,” and “was proud of it”—which is the plain-speaking man’s version of the more rhetorical and mystical sublimities of Herr Rosenberg’s school. Moreover he recently produced a memorable definition of the new racial religion against which German Protestants and Catholics are fighting gallantly —”the indigenous apprehension of God,” he called it. There is a temptation to answer this “blood and soil” talk with a cry of “stuff and nonsense.” But the matter is far too serious. It is a short step from the “indigenous apprehension,” of moral standards to cannibalism.

SCOTCH POINT OUT NAZI INCONSISTENCY

The Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, in an editorial entitled ‘Jew-baiting,’ writes as follows:

When anti-Jewish enthusiasts started on their persecution crusade, they probably did not think that they would have to pay for their game. They have had to pay in various ways, the boycott, for instance; that seems to have been a serious thing for German industry.

It is hard in this competitive world to be consistent. That the German newspapers are finding out in this matter of Jewbaiting. It looks odd, to say the least, for a newspaper to denounce the Jew and all that pertains to him, and on other pages to advertise the goods of Jewish firms.

Some journals in East Germany have had their consciences touched, and they have made up their minds to make a clean sweep of Jewish advertisements. But so far these newspapers are the only ones in broad Germany that have allowed their sense of consistency to interfere with business.

A simplification in designing, tool-making and manufacturing operations by the Ford Motor Company was the adoption of a decimal system of measurement, instead of common fractions, for many parts of Ford ears and trucks. Tried for several years, it has now become an accepted international standard of measurement.