JEWS IN GERMANY

Taranaki Daily News, 26 September 1933, Page 10

JEWS IN GERMANY

BONDAGE OF HITLERISM

HOPES FOR BETTER FUTURE.

ADDRESS BY RABBI GOLDSTEIN. “Another stage in life’s journey, a period of overpowering pathos and tragedy for our brethren in Germany, has been made,” said Rabbi S. A. Goldstein, in his address at the Jewish New Year service held in the Auckland Synagogue. There was a large congregation and a feature of the service was the reading of a special prayer for the Jews of Germany, prepared by the chief rabbi of the British Empire, Dr. J. H. Hertz. This prayer is now read at every service of all Jewish congregations in the Empire. “We now stand on the threshold of the New Year with its hopes and fears,” said Rabbi Goldstein, “with potentialities of the greatest significance for the world of Jewry if we are directed by God’s light and bring all our national resources to bear on the problem, which presses for a satisfactory and timely solution. The problem affects every individual Jew, wherever he may chance to live, who has any feeling at all for his kith and kin. FAITH IN FUTURE. “We dare not divest ourselves of the responsibility which is pressing upon us more heavily to-day than it has for centuries past—since the Spanish inquisition. Thanks to the world Jewish consciousness, reawakened to-day as a powerful leverage, we shall again weather the storm beating in its fury against the rock on which we stand unbroken faith in the God of Israel. “We cannot but be impressed these days with the destructive virus of antiSemitism which is spreading to Austria with the introduction of Fascism, and the effects of the political changes in Continental Europe on the lot of our people in disturbed countries. We cannot tell when a conflagration, with its trail of destruction, may break out, from which our brethren will suffer most of all. “We all know the saying of the stone and the pitcher. This, I am afraid, is what we may have to face. Against this we have a united Israel, strong and unwavering in its determination to find an avenue of escape for a torturned brethren from the bondage of Hitler’s regime, the duration of which it is impossible to foretell. Recent events have set thinking even the Jew with only the faintest spark of Jewish instinct in a way he has not done before.

“It has been a rude awakening for many and has aroused them at last to a sense of a faculty hitherto dormant, the sense of Jewish brotherhood. To read of the experiences of our brethren in Germany, the body and soul-killing conditions which make life a living death, the cruel outrages from which age and sex are not immune, the unfeeling inhuman expressions in reference to our people, makes one's blood run cold.

“But the truth of history’s lesson stands as good as ever. Hitler and his followers hold in their hand the spade with which they will be digging their own grave. We have had ample evidence of their condemnation before the bar of enlightened public opinion, and we thank God for the innumerable expressions of sympathy and horror by the great leaders of thought throughout the civilised world. “In God and Judaism we have the reality. May this New Year bring release to our brethren in bondage, and may the mission of transplanting as many of our brethren as possible from Germany to Palestine receive our full support.”