News Brief

(Jewish Telegraphic Agency Mail Service)

A letter written by Sholom Schwartzbard on November 2, 1925, months beore he shot Petlura, addressed to his friend, Dr. Salkind of London, is published here today in the “Pariser Hajnt.” The letter shows to what an extent Schwartzbard at that time was entirely preoccupied with his thoughts of the sufferings which the Jews in the Ukraine had undergone during the pogroms. “What can I do,” he writes, “if I cannot forget the pogroms which I witnessed? I would like to be strong and powerful enough to embrace and defend the whole world against the whole world. And since I cannot do that I am downcast and sad. On the surface it seems as if things go very well with me. There are many who would wish to be in my place. I have a wife and a splendid business, I am known to some extent in public life. What more could one wish?

“How can I tell the world that the blood of a Kishinev Shamash, of a Rabbi Akibah and of tens and hundreds of thousands who fell under Chmielnicki, Gonta, Sokol, Zelione, Balachovitch, Denikin and others will not let me rest and pulls at my conscience. They call me to avenge them. What does the world know of all the libels at Damascus. Kiev, now at Lemburg and thousands of others? To many,” Schwartzbard writes, “this is all past history, done with and forgotten. To me it is an open wound, bleeding and sore which can never be healed.”