Rabbi Silver Urges Alliance of Anti-nazi Forces As Women Open U.p.a. Drive

A two-point program calling for alliance with the forces combatting Nazism and the speedy rebuilding of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was urged upon the Jews today by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, of Cleveland, co-chairman of the United Palestine Appeal, addressing 1,000 women at the opening of the women’s campaign of the Appeal at the Astor.

Another speaker was Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, women’s leader, who bitterly denounced the Nazi regime and offered her own two-point program for aiding refugees: receiving as many as possible of them here with hospitality and pressing the movement for providing a home for them in Palestine.

The meeting accepted a $200,000 quota in the $1,500,000 New York campaign. Other speakers were Mrs. William D. Sporborg, chairman of the women’s division and Nathan Straus, chairman of the New York Appeal.

“We will not go back to the ghetto,” Rabbi Silver asserted. “We may be dragged back there, but we will ally ourselves with all the liberal forces of the world to undermine and destroy the reactionary forces.”

He asserted that “history has not said its last word. The Nazi regime is three years old and the Jews are 3,000 years old.”

He urged as a measure of “national self-defense” that the Jews unite “with all the groups in the world who see in this violent reaction a menace to the whole of modern civilization.”

He declared that “the Jew who does not throw himself into the battle which is raging today is underwriting his own suicide.”

Lauding the Jews’ achievements in Palestine, Rabbi Silver appealed for “building as rapidly as we can of our own Jewish homeland.”

Rabbi Silver spoke in the evening at a reunion of delegates to the annual Zionist convention in the Bronx.

Mrs. Catt asserted, in speaking of the Hitlerite regime, that “never before has an ordered society deliberately and with intent so persecute a minority of its own citizens.”

She added that the Third Reich has taken away from the Jews “their citizenship and the right to hold administrative positions. She has denied educational facilities to their children and economic freedom to the adults.

“The law conditions under which a Jew may live in Germany are an amazing combination of injustices. What Germany has done is utterly in insistent with the standards of the twentieth century.”

Mrs. Catt stated that “the nations have not made as energetic demand in behalf of the Jews as we should expect.” She urged Americans to “extend the hospitable hand of friends to every refugee.”

Speaking of her visit to Palestine in 1920, Mrs. Catt said that although a Christian she had become a Zionist. She praised Palestinian institutions, expressing the hope the Hebrew University would become “one of the world’s greatest.”