Raids on Jews all over Paris today followed the arrest of 6,000 Jews there yesterday in a round-up by German troops and French police, and the execution of a Jew named Samuel Tyszelmen and a Frenchman named Henri Gautherot, as a result of the recent anti-Nazi demonstrations at various Paris railway stations.
Yesterday’s arrests were the first mass arrests of Jews since May 15, when some 5,000 Jews were rounded up in Paris and sent to labor camps. Today a combined force of German and French police continued to stop people in the streets and to detain those who could not prove that they were “Aryans.”
Though the anti-Nazi demonstrations of last week took place in districts far from the Jewish section, French policemen and German soldiers threw a cordon yesterday around the Place de la Republic, which is the very heart of the Jewish section of Paris, and conducted a house-to-house raid which lasted five hours from 6 a.m. to 11 a.m. In this gigantic raid some 6,000 Jews between the ages of 17 and 50 were seized and transported on buses to a temporary concentration camp in Drancy, a Paris suburb, near Le Bourget airfield. Persons who proved that they were “Aryans” were not detained.
In unoccupied France today police were similarly stopping travelers on roads and examining their documents. No arrests, however, were reported.
A report from Paris today states that Chief Rabbi Julian Weill, whom the Nazis arrested several months ago, is still held in a Paris prison. He was arrested when he refused the German request to organize in Paris a Jewish Community Council along the same lines as the one organized in the Warsaw Jewish ghetto. In rejecting the Nazi order, Chief Rabbi Weill declared that the Jews in France do not consider themselves a national minority and, therefore, could not engage in organizing a Jewish Council, since this would mean undertaking political work, whereas the Jewish community is a strictly religious body, dealing with no activities of a political nature.
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.
