ELOQUENT CHAMPION

Dominion, Volume 38, Issue 20, 18 October 1944, Page 8

ELOQUENT CHAMPION

Mrs. Silverman Appeals For, Jewish People

Yesterday; the last day of her stay in Wellington, was an exceptionally busy one for Airs. Archibald Silverman, Rhode Island, U.S.A., who is visiting New Zealand on behalf of the Palestine Founds-' tion Fund, as a representative of the Jewish Agency of Palestine. Her official programme began at 10.30, and continued without a break till 4.30. In that time she had been accorded a civic reception and had given three addresses, pleading the cause of a national home for the Jews. At night she spoke again, this time the audience consisting mainly of members of the Jewish community. Airs. Silverman will leave Wellington this morning for Auckland, en route to Australia. A large audience of members of the local branch of the League of Nations Union heard Airs. Silverman's eloquent appeal when she addressed them yesterday afternoon. “We have become the conscience and. the problem of the world,’’ she said. “We have a land which is rightly our own, Palestine. Can there be a new world order and true democracy after the war, if nothing is done for the homeless Jews? They and Palestine are one, each irrevocably joined to the other. The Jewish people would not have survived thes'e 2000 years of wandering, suffering and being driven from place to place, without the hope of returning there. I have a deep faith in the justice of the world, which will prevail and let the Jews make Jalestine their home. “Sipce when has the world been so taken up with the Arabs?” she said. Does it hate the Arab less or. the Jew more that it views the situation as it does?” The Arabs had not given men or guns in this war, as the Jews had. They did not want to fight for their own liberation in the last war and again in this war, had been ready to sell out to the, highest'bidder. There were now 600,000 Jews in Palestine and they had not dispossessed a single Arab. They were buying the land from them, not just taking it. The Arabs in Palestine were the cleanest and most contented of all their race in the Near East since the coming of the Jews. So why this cry about Arabs? What if the Arabs did not want the Jews, what were people going to do about it? “Did the Maoris want you New Zealanders in their country, or the aboriginals ask the settlers to come to Australia, or did the Red Indians want us in America? Mrs. Silverman said. Four million Jews could easily, be brought into Palestine. It was simple for the Arabs to create a straw man when they did not hear dissenting voices from Christendom. The speaker said she was worried about a world that could be so quiescent about it all. “We are the only people on God’s earth to whom God gavea land, yet we are not allowed to enter it.” By her mission she hoped to arouse thinking people- to see the wrong was righted, so that by so doing the world could continue under the laws of decency, justice and humanity. For 2000 years the Jews had carried a longing for a home of their own and a love for Palestine.. When she addressed a Christian religious body recently in her home State, Airs Silverman said she asked where was the protest of the Christian world against what Hitler was doing to the Jews. Its silence was an encouragement for him to carry on. He had started with the Jews, but left alone, he would end by wreaking havoc with all Christendom. Five million Jews had been done to death by Hitler. “You. in New Zealand love your country, which is just over 100 years old,” she said. “Can you imagine how the Jews loved the Germany they had helped to build for more than 1100 years, industrially, scientifically and artistically?” Then came the cry that the Jews, or one per cent of the entire population, were controlling everything within the country. Logically, that being the case, the other 99 per. cent should easily have destroyed the other one per cent, overnight, but, illogically this was not so. So it had been throughout history, beginning with the days when the Pharaohs and enslaved the Jews. Logically the Jews should have perished and their masters survived, but, illogically, the reverse was true. Alts. Silverman said she considered this was a symbol of hope in itself. . . She told the story of the beginning of her own home town, Providence, in 'Rhode Island. It was founded by a. minister Roger Williams, who was driven out by the Puritans in the Plymouth ot America, because he wanted them to worship God in a different way. hncndly Indians took care of him and in ms wanderings by canal, he came to a peninsula and called it; Rhode Island Ho thanked God that with the help ot Providence he had been saved and proclaimed the spot .whereon he worshipped a place where there was always to be religious freedom and equality. JJo you wonder that I, a Jewess, revere Roger Williams,” she said. The Rev Gladstone Hughes, president of the branch, welcomed Airs. Silverman. The Consul-General of Belgium, M. A. Nihotte, in thanking the speaker, said Belgium hud always got along well with the Jews living there.