East European Jews Seen Facing “final Disaster”

Anti-Semitism, spreading through Eastern Europe, is turning the Jewish tragedy in that biggest Jewish center in the world into “a final disaster of truly historic magnitude,” Otto D. Tolischus declared today in a dispatch to the New York Times from Warsaw.

The disaster in Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary and Rumania, for approaching its high water mark in Poland, confronts the Jews with the choice of “repeating the Exodus on a bigger scale than that chronicled in the Bible” or “dying a slow death from economic strangulation, he declared.

He attributed the development mainly to the revolution in East European states which “demands a place in the sun” at the expense of national minorities, and to overpopulation and economic crisis. The Jews are the main sufferers from the national revolution, he asserted, because they had the most to lose and because of their “unhealthy social structure.”

Describing “rowdy anti-Semitism” and “terroristic activities,” he cited the following unofficial toll of anti-Semitic excesses in Poland, between May, 1935, when Marshal Pilsudski died, and the end of January, 1937: 118 Jews killed and 1,350 wounded; 137 Jewish stores bombed; 35 Jewish homes burned down; in addition, more than 100 Jewish student injured in the last three months in university rioting.

Although Mr. Tolischus described the Polish Government as combating violence, he quoted Jewish leaders as pointing out that little improvement could be expected as long as anti-Jewish agitation was permitted to run amuck. He said Jewish leaders deplore the “ambiguous generality” of Government pronouncements and especially the campaign for “evacuation” of Jews.

The dispatch dwelled on the adverse effects on the Jews of Polonization of towns, industries and universities. “Altogether, say the Jews bitterly, if a Polish Hitler should arise, there would be little work for him to do,” Mr. Telischus concluded.