All members of the Warsaw Beth Din, high rabbinical court, were believed to have been killed during the German siege, it was declared today by refugees from Poland who reached London. The rabbis refused to leave Warsaw, declaring it was their duty to remain.
Complete annihilation of the Jews in Poland was the aim of the Nazi invaders, eyewitnesses to the war told the J.T.A. They said Jewish districts had been persistently and heavily bombed and shelled, and Jewish casualties had been out of proportion.
The number of Jews killed and maimed in the densely populated Nalewki, Smocza and Nowolipki Jewish quarters of Warsaw, which were almost completely destroyed, was far greater proportionately than elsewhere, it was said. The Jewish quarter of Krakow received the brunt of the first air attacks in that city. The first bomb in Lublin killed 72 persons, of whom 61 were Jewish women and children. The loss of Jewish lives in smaller towns everywhere was high. Jewish towns like Lukow and Siedlice were completely annihilated, according to the survivors.
Joel Cang, Warsaw correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, who arrived in London last week after escaping from Poland via Rumania, declared he saw hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees on all roads leading to the eastern and southeastern frontiers. Thousands of Jewish women and children died of bombings, epidemic and exhaustion, Cang said, and many refugees were trapped because of the authorities refusal to issue passports and visas. The Yugoslavian and Bulgarian consulates in Rumania refused to issue transit visas to Jews.
Because no arrangements had been made for civilian evacuation, few Jewish leaders escaped from Warsaw. Among those who did succeed in leaving the beleaguered city were Senator Raphael Szereszewski, a banker; Dr. Henry Rosmarin, a Zionist leader, Maurice Maizel, president of the Warsaw Jewish Community, Sheshkin, a leader of the New Zionist Organization, and a Dr. Hindes.
More than 40 Jewish journalists who reached the Rumanian frontier did not succeed in crossing it and were believed to be presently in the hands of the Soviet forces. They included Manuel Mozes, chief of the Warsaw bureau of the J.T.A., and Bernard Singer, writer for a Warsaw Yiddish daily. Jerzy Szapiro, Warsaw correspondent of the New York Times, said he last saw Mozes on Sept. 13 in Krzemienice, a town near the Rumanian frontier which served as a short-lived seat of the Polish Government, and believed that Mozes was stranded there.
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.
