“In Munich, Hitler’s stronghold, I was told that the little Austrian housepainter who today has the German nation under the iron heel of dictatorship, will topple from power within a year and a half or two years. Germany is feeling the boycott—and it hurts!”
This was the observation of Emanuel Rosenberg, pioneer communal leader, who has just returned from a five-months’ trip with his wife which took him to the two centers of world Jewish attention—Palestine and Germany. He spoke on his travel experiences at a B’nai B’rith luncheon.
“As long as Hitler reigns, German Jewry’s fate is pitifully hopeless,” declared Mr. Rosenberg, who spent some time in Berlin and Munich.
TOMB FOR YOUNG
“And for the young Jews, Germany is a tomb. In grammar schools Jewish children are taunted and mistreated; after graduation there are no jobs for Jews. The Jew cannot leave Germany because he is not allowed to take his money out of Naziland. Socially ostracized, the Jew in Germany today lives always in dread of new oppression.
“I talked with many Jews, who, if they had been overheard in their conversation with me, would have been punished with imprisonment—even death—at the hands of the Nazis. For although millions are not in sympathy with Hitlerism in Germany today and even in the Nazis’ own ranks there is dissension that is kept from the outside world—the gag of anti-Hitlerite sentiment keeps everyone mum.”
In contrast to Jewish misery in Germany Mr. Rosenberg told how he had found happy Jewish workers in the fields of Palestine, which he ha dvisited previously in 1932. “There is no unemployment, no depression, no anti-Semitism in Palestine,” he said.
REFUGE IN PALESTINE
The Holy Land offers the only refuge for Germany’s Jews, Mr. Rosenberg, an ardent Zionist, declared. “And from what I saw in Germany the young Jews in that land of terror must be sent to Palestine, where they can live proudly as Jews, instead of without hope and without a future, their lives shattered.”
Mr. Rosenberg returned to Seattle in time to celebrate his seventieth birthday yesterday. He was born in New York, came west to Portland in 1885 and settled in Seattle in 1888. He witnessed the great Seattle fire which wiped out the city’s business section, helped found Seattle’s first synagogue and was a founder of Seattle’s only Reform synagogue, Temple de Hirsch, of which he is now a vice-president.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
