Jewish newspapers throughout Poland were confiscated by the authorities today for featuring a declaration charging that the Warsaw District Court’s blaming a section of the Jewish press and people for a Jew’s slaying of a Polish soldier would encourage pogroms.
The declaration was issued by the Union of Jewish Journalists of Poland following the action of the court yesterday in sentencing Judah Leib Chatzkelewicz, a Jewish worker, to death for the murder of Sergeant Bujak in June, 1936, which led to serious anti-Jewish disorders in Minsk-Mazowioc.
Simultaneously, Deputy Emil Sommerstein visited the Undersecretary of Justice to protest the court’s stigmatizing of the Jewish press and people, and what he called insults to the Jewish religion by Nationalist attorneys in the case.
Premier Skladkowski, it was learned, will be asked to intervene in the case.
The entire Nationalist and pro-Government press published the Chatzkelewicz verdict without comment, but used bold-face type for the passages of the decision blaming the Jews.
The declaration of the Union of Jewish Journalists, printed on the front pages of most Jewish newspapers, stated:
“The judgment of the Warsaw District Court delivered yesterday in the trial of Chatzkelewicz contains the following passage:
” Not an unimportant, although indirect influence on Chatzkelewicz’s criminal act, possibly even on his final decision to commit the
murder, was the envenomed and hostile attitude to the Polish State, Government and the Polish army of a certain section of the Jewish population and press. This hostile attitude became more outspoken and more aggressive in the few months before the murder.’
” Thus the Jewish press and Jewish society, particularly the Jewish workers, are accused of complicity in an individual act of the condemned Chatzkelewicz.
” In the name of the Jewish press we protest energetically against this absolutely unfounded accusation made at a moment when the Jewish population of Poland is the object of a systematic extermination campaign finding expression in a more widespread legalized boycott, terrorism, repressions and excesses, taking the form — as in the example of Brzesc (Brest-Litovsk) — of wholesale pogroms.
” Such a statement from official sources tends to justify the present extermination campaign, encouraging these acts in the future. The Jewish press repudiates this reproach with all the force at its command.”
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.
