The Maccabaean

TWELVE hundred young Jewish men have sailed for Palestine via Canada at this writing to fight on the Palestinian frontier. They have been sworn in as enlisted men of the English Royal Fusileers and have started their training as soldiers of the Homeland. These Jews from America, who on account of age or alien citizenship are not subject to draft here, now form part of the first Jewish legion to fight for the Jewish cause since the days of Bar Kochba and Akiba.

Three detachments have paraded to the piers of the Fall River Line to embark for Boston, their first stop. From Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and other centers, they have come to New York... In a small town there might be only one or two men to wear the arm-band of the Legion. Even they were the subjects of mass-meetings and parades. At dinners given in their honor they spoke and listened in an embarrassed way to speeches, while during the meal they would chant “Mi Yivenh ha- Galil” or one of the other songs of the Legion. In New York, more parades and more speeches. Traffic policemen halted surface cars, and diverted auto-mobiles’ to side streets while the legionaries and their escorts marched up Fifth Avenue or through the East Side, or on the avenues of the Bronx.

English and French officers added tone to the occasion. Everywhere the battalion made an altogether new and strange impression. It was startling enough for Jews to hang out Zionist pennants in honor of Jewish soldiers who were going to fight for the Jewish land, but it was quite as startling for non-Jews to see the marching men. Short, swarthy fellows, many with glasses, only one or two in uniforms, they collected crowds around them, cordial, appreciative crowds who only once in a while might say, "At last." Tens of thousands of Jews are wearing American khaki; in the same degree with their neighbors they have answered the call to war. But those sixty thousand, to the non-Jews even, are not the representatives of their own ideals and do not impinge on the consciousness of the observer like the Legion.

Awaken, O Jerusalem, Thou city of the king! The. Lord God of Israel Has wrought a wondrous thing; ‘A byword and a mocking ~ Through centuries of shame, He comes to raise thee from the dust And -build again thy name.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Lift up thy head and see The mother may forget her child, But God remembers thee!

The swords of many nations Have made of thee a prey, The fect of many strangers _-Have worn thy stones away; But hearken, O Jerusalem, And hear a joyful sound— The tread of Jewish warriors On their ancestral ground!

Arise and sing, Jerusalem,Who art no longer dumb;O citadel of David,The sons of David come!—DON MARQUIS' column,N. Y. Evening Sun.

In the intervals between marching and listening to speeches, the men have held meetings, arranged their affairs, and visited the Zionist headquarters. Boys who .claimed to be eighteen came in for the sweaters and comfort-kits that were furnished them. Men. asked assistance in arranging their insurance on. their new footing. Cooper gave up his sheriff’s baton in Connecticut, Rosenberg a flourishing business in Philadelphia. We have all types; Rosenberg grizzled but tough,