Seven Million Jews Under Nazi Rule Denied Right to Greet New Year

Seven million Jews under Nazi rule, already the victims of a brutal war which menaces their very existence, will be denied even the solace of practicing their religion this Rosh Hashanah, as the culminating act of the Nazi campaign to exterminate religion as a whole and the Jewish religion in particular.

A documented record of the Hitler attempt to extirpate the institutions of the Jewish religion was published here today by the Institute of Jewish Affairs of which Dr. Jacob Robinson is director. The record indicates that he war against the Jewish religion began, in its accelerated form, on that November night in 1938 when more than 431 synagogues were destroyed in a single night in Germany alone. Its present tempo, moving toward the goal of total extermination, was established in September of 1939 when the Nazis launched their new attack upon the Jewish religion during the High Holiday services of the Jews during the invasion of Poland. The methods and the tempo established in Poland have now travelled to and have been duplicated in every country of Nazi occupation.

Describing the cumulative effect of this Nazi war against the Jewish religion, the document issued by the Institute indicates:

(1) The destruction of the loading synagogues of Europe or their conversion into public latrines, garages, stables and similar uses.

(2) The prohibition of public worship.

(3) The wholesale and deliberate desecration of the Torah, scrolls of Law, the most secret of the Jewish religious symbols.

(4) The systematic effort to destroy ancient Jewish tombstones which constitute the evidence of the organic place of the Jews in the history of civilized Germany.

(5) The destruction and plunder of Jewish religious libraries involving millions of volumes of historic Jewish writings.

(6) The prohibition of the observance of the Sabbath by the Jews who were the first to give to the world the idea of a universal day of rest.

(7) The dissolution of the Jewish religious communities.

(8) The liquidation of the institutions of Jewish religious education which served as the source as well for secular education for hundreds of thousands of Jews.

(9) The banning of shechitah, the Jewish ritual method of slaughtering animals for food and with it the denial of any possibility for Jews to secure kosher meat.

(10) The murder of numerous rabbis.

This new and specialized war against the Jewish religion, which has assumed frontal proportions since 1939, is according to the Institute, part of the Nazi war upon religion as a whole which is regarded as inimical to the Nazi German State.