Acting upon instructions from Vichy, General Maxim Weygand today ordered a census of all Jews in Algeria. The census is to start on September 1, and must be concluded within ten days. The 111,000 Jews in Algeria will have their identification documents stemped with the letter “J” as in occupied France.
Pierre Pucheu, Vichy’s new Minister of the Interior, today publicly condemned the bomb outrages against synagogues in Marseille, Vichy and Nice. It has been established that the explosions in the synagogues were the work of an anti-Semitic movement.
“The placing of bombs in synagogues was done with a view to compromise the anti-Jewish measures which our government wishes to carry out legally and without violence,” Pucheu declared in a public statement.
More than 9,000 refugees, the majority of them Jews, are now interned in French camps in North Africa. The largest camp, with 4,500 internees, is Canton de Boghari. The camps are surrounded by barbed wire and the internees fear the possibility of being sent to the Sahara desert for construction of the Trens-Sahara railroad.
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.
