PERSECUTED JEWS

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4816, 28 July 1939, Page 2

PERSECUTED JEWS

"00 NOT SEEK REVENGE." Addressing a Defence of Liberty meeting at Hoyland recently, Mr. Neville Laski, K.C., president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said that Jews did not seek revenge, states the Yorkshire Post. "We realise," he said, "the horror with which the German people as a whole looked upon the bestial and organised pogrom of November, 1938. We have no quarrel with the German people. All we ask is that the Jews of Germany, and now of Greater Germany, should be restored to the parity of citizenship which they enjoyed before the Nazi regime."

Mr. Laski said it was estimated that at least 100,000 men, women and children from Greater Germany were among the exiles in need of monetary help. Until the establishment of Lord Baldwin's Refugee Fund they were assisted only by Quakers and Jews. Thanks were due to Lord Baldwin for the lead he had given on a question that was a test for humanity itself. Dealing with Britain's reception of refugees, Mr. Laski said it was often argued that the introduction of Jews and others meant the introduction of people who would take jobs at the expense of the unemployed, or oust British labour already employed. A precedent condition to work being obtained or business being started was that the Home Office and the Ministry of Labour must in every case be quite satisfied.

"The best proof of the utility of the refugee in this aspect," Mr. Laski said, "is that the Home Secretary has testified that 11,000 German Jews who have come into this country, in so far as they have been permitted to establish businesses, have been the means of over 15000 British men and women becoming employed." Declaring that, it was a sad reflection that a meeting of that kind should be necessary in the twentieth century, Mr. Laski said they were demonstrating their resentment against a political creed, which not only failed to recognise the elementary decencies which made up the sum total of humanity, civilisation, and freedom, as people of democratic countries understood them, but which also attacked rights of religion. "I do not wish to suggest that we

look on this matter in terms of revenge," he added. "It has even been said that the Jew has stood at the. grave of his oppressor.

"In another generatioin at most Germany will realise that the persecution of Jew and Christian alike has created an enormous gap in spirit, moral and economic value. We Jews have survived the centuries, and we shall survive the incident in world history represented by the Nazi regime."