Only through a boycott can the “decent citizenry” of Germany be made to realize that under the leadership of Adolf Hitler the German nation is being thrown into “abysmal darkness,” Dr. Maxwell Ross, chairman of the Allied Local School Boards of Brooklyn, said last night at an anti-Nazi rally at the Brooklyn Jewish Center, 667 Eastern Parkway. The meeting was under the auspices of the Vigilance Division of the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights.
“It is difficult for me to believe that the rank and file of the German people, conceived as they are in deep religious training, agree with the principles promulgated by the cruel tyrant who at present rules their destiny,” said Dr. Ross. “It is difficult to understand that these millions of decent, law-abiding people would so meekly yield to the dictates of their leaders, unless somewhere in their hearts, latent in past years, the spirit of hatred resided.
“This is not a Jewish battle alone, it is a battle for human rights,” Dr. Ross continued. “Hitler is not merely indicting a race and a people, he is indicting God Himself; for are the Jews not the children of the same creator, and are we not Jews because, in His divine wisdom, He saw fit to create us as such.
“It is not, therefore, time that men would begin to realize that it makes no difference how one worships his God, what road one would select to travel on the great ocean of eternity, just so long as he keeps moving in the right direction, emblazened by the glittering light of God’s sunshine and the beauty of God’s world.”
Hitler’s persecution of the Jews has not been entirely futile, in the opinion of Dr. Ross, for “this maniac has forced an awakening in the hearts of German Jewry that no amount of denying and no amount of abnegation can in any way relieve them of their Jewishness.”
“His beastly task is done, and now he will meet his Waterloo. It is the old story of Haman, but we must hasten that movement by uniting as forcefully as we can in the great boycott movement.”
OLDEST CONGREGATION
Kehillat Anshe Ma’arab, the oldest Jewish congregation in Chicago, was established on November 3, 1847. Morris L. Leopold, a young man of twenty-six, was elected its first president.
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.
