The Maccabaean

The Titanic Disaster.

THE event of the past month, depressing and at the same time inspiring, was the disaster of the wrecking of the giant steamship, the Titanic, in which about fifteen hundred souls were lost. The Titanic was wrecked as a result of a collision with an ice-berg, which is presumed to have ripped open her sides, and rendered useless her air-tight compartments, her bulk- head provisions, etc., for within several hours after the encounter. with. it seemed, a sinister contempt for the ‘safety provisions introduced by modern science. the Titanic slowly sank with its human freight, and the turbulent waters were filled with struggling human forms. About six or seven hundred human beings were saved as a result of using the life-boats before the Titanic went down. So confident were many that the ship was unsinkable that they refused to enter the life-boats, with the result that a number of the boats were practically empty when lowered. But we are not to chronicle the details of this stupendous disaster. What it is our duty to point out is the signal exhibition given in this disaster of the courage of Jews in the face of unescapable death. When Isidor Straus and his noble wife stood on the deck of the Titanic as the water was slowly rising about them, they gave testimony ' for the Jewish people: they testified so that the entire world might hear that there is physical courage. physical bravery. among the Jewish people as there is among all other peoples. The individual suffers for the faults of his race: so too. the race suffers for the faults of its individuals. and the race is exalted by the virtues of its members. There has been courage among Jews: how many hundreds of times has it been made evident? But the world refused to credit a beggar race with the possession of that virtue. It required a striking exhibition of it as was given by Isidor and Ida Straus, by Henry B.

Harris, by Emil Taussig, by Benjamin Guggenheim, and by the many others of our race who went down with the ship into a watery grave. That well-tried conventional virtue, “Give ladies precedence,” was inborn in a man of the character of Isidor Straus. He could not have stepped out and taken a place in one of the life-boats; he was bound by that conventional ideal; 50 were they all, the men who stood aside. Isidor Straus had assimilated that ideal. He was a man who was firmly and everlastingly American in the propagandistic sense. His Judaism was the slight bond of occasional worship, the recognition of one God, etc. But in his death, as in his life, he felt that he was a witness for the Jewish people before the goyim, and he so conducted himself that nothing he ever did could be used as a weapon against his people, but rather as a source of protection for them.

Palestine Exhibit in London

An exhibit of the products of the Bezalel and the Evalina de Rothschild schools under representative auspices was held in London during the middle of May, which brought to the attention of influential Jews of the British capital the various activities that are in being in the Holy Land. At a meeting held at the residence of Baroness Goldsmid de Palmeira, a daughter of the late Colonel Goldsmid, Sir Philip Magnus presided and was gracious enough to say: "Whether you subscribe to the political tenets of the Zionists or not, whether you look forward to the time when the Jews may become the governing class in the land of their fathers, or whether you are satisfied that they should form a thrifty and thriving section of the mixed population of the country, we must all desire that they shall be honorable and honored, worthy of the ancestry from which they are descended, an example to the nations