MASSACRE OF JEWS

Otago Witness, Issue 3414, 20 August 1919, Page 60

MASSACRE OF JEWS

TERRIBLE STATE OF AFFAIRS. UNITED PROTEST URGED. In the course ot an address at the Synagogue on Saturday, the Rev. M. Diamond (Jewish rabbi) said one could not but regret deeply the fact that though the war on the battlefield had ceased for the time being, internecine strife was still going on as before. Peace had been proclaimed and celebrated with eclat throughout the world, and yet daily they road of industrial unrest, unemployment, poverty, and distress. All that was due, no doubt, in part at least, to the war; to the cessation of the production of real wealth; to the waste of incalculable sums spent on the war. To cap all that they got almost daily cables of the massacres of Jews in Russia, or in those petty republics and kingdoms and governments which inliabited that most unfortunate country. If they consulted the Jewish papers from America they would be appalled by the fact that since the Russian Revolution and the overthrow of Czardom. things had not only not improved, but had become steadily worse. There was hardly a day on which Jews were not being done' to death by those inhuman savages who were born and bred on Russian soil. Be they Big Russians, Little Russians, Revolutionists, Bolshevists, or Poles; divided and estranged as they might be in their politics and political aims, they seemed united heart and soul on the one point of exterminating the Jewish nation. These pogroms were by no means sporadic outbursts arising from the abnormal condition and state of general unsettlement, nor were they forced on by a bigoted government to divert the minds of the dissatisfied, disillusioned people to other channels. They saw a deliberate, cold-blooded attempt on the part of the Russian cultured masses to wipe out the Jewish people from the face of the earth. Vanquished on the battlefield, impotent in the face of the real enemy, they used the murderous cudgel on that unfortunate race —and, unfortunately, with considerable success. The war created havoc among the Jewish masses. Untold numbers had perished from cold, starvation, and the sword. Those who had the ill-luck to survive had been reduced to th > lowest ebb of distress. Only last wed: they had received a heartrending appc-c: from Anglo-Jewry asking help f the Jews in Poland who had neither bro nor clothing, wood nor shelter, nor ev soap or disinfectants. Day by day J<" ware being killed in big Odessa the troops. of General Grigore: attacked the Jewish quarters and slaughtered every Jew they could lay hands on. From New York they got a cablegram informing them that, during June, 120,0C0 Jews, including 15,000 children, whose onlyguilt consisted in having been born in Russia —were slaughtered. Pogroms had also occurred in Hungary and Galicia and elsewhere. Where was all this going to end? Were they really doomed to be butchered like sheep without even protesting before a world that professed to believe in democracy, equality, and fraternity ? Was it possible to assume that lasting, peace would reign on earth while the hearts of civilised men remained unmoved by the hideous spectacle of fratricide, by the murder of the sons of that race that gave to the world the civilisation which it possessed? In pre-war days they were told that it was impossible' to interfere in the affairs of any country. But the war had altered all that. The Allies had dictated and were dictating the politics of the fractions of the once mighty Empire, Russia? Was it too much to expsct that Western civilisation should make the voice of Right heard throughout Russia, against the brutal force exercised on the weak, oppressed, and innocent Jewish people? Did the Church approve of all this? Were the men of science, the seekers after truth and righteousness, the champions of tho poor and the downtrodden, content to look and raise no voice in behalf of the Jewish race? He hardly believed it. And the Jews themselves, what were they doing? They were collecting money by the request of the London Jewish committees, trusting the Anglo-Jewish Association to do all the mediation without even strengthening their hands by encouraging and urging them to intercede before the Great Powers on their behalf. The misfortune of their people had always been the fact that they spoke with many voices, and not with one united voice. Let'them protest before the world, and let the weight of the whole Jewish nation be behind that protest, and the world would hear them.