Editorials

Statements published elsewhere in this issue of the Jewish Daily Bulletin testify to the esteem and the honor in which leaders of American Jewry held Dr. Chaim Arlosoroff, political representative of the Palestine Executive, and to the horror with which they regard the deed of the men, whose bullets terminated a magnificent career on a bloodstained street in Tel Aviv.

He was only thirty-five years of age and although he had achieved much, he was only at the crest of a more magnificent career. He was an orator whose words even his enemies rushed to hear. He was a mediator, for it was he who brought together, under the aegis of the Histadruth, the two elements represented in the Poale Zion and the Hapoel Hazair. He was a statesman, for it was he who formulated perhaps the most comprehensive scheme for the settlement of German Jews in Palestine. He was loyal, for he fought for Dr. Chaim Weizmann at the latest world Congress of Zionists with unmatched fervor. So closely knit together, in loyalty and in mutual understanding, were these two men that it was taken for granted that Dr. Arlosoroff would succeed Dr. Weizmann; in fact, the younger man had already won the nick-name of “Chaim the Second.”

Dr. Arlosoroff was an economist of no mean stature, and this was most clearly apparent in the book he wrote on the subject of a national loan for Palestine, a work which attracted a great deal of attention. He was a man of many tongues, and a man who could learn what he needed to know. When he came to Palestine he did not know Hebrew, but by dint of application, he learned Hebrew well enough not only to make thrilling addresses in it, but to write in that ancient tongue.

Men had but to know him to believe in him and to admire him. The bullets that struck him down bereaved every friend of the National Homeland.