The Maccabaean

THE Jewish position in Poland continues to be a source of grave concern, but fortunately the latest reports are not so distressing as they have recently been. We still receive telegraphic messages of assaults occurring in different places, but they are neither so frequent nor so serious as they have been in the past six months. The reason for this decline in persecution (may the decline continue to the vanishing point!) is to be sought in two causes, which are closely connected. The one is the wide publicity given in Western Europe and America to the outrages committed in Poland; the other is the repressive measures adopted by the Polish authorities —and the latter could never have taken place but for the former. If publicity has ever proved to possess remedial virtues, it has certainly been so in this case. So far as England is concerned, the publicity has been threefold— that of the press, the platform, and Parliament, and the bulk of the work has had to be directed by the Central Office of the Zionist Organization owing to the sloth of the Anglo-Jewish organizations.

The Poles have been unscrupulous in their methods of deceiving the public, acting upon the principle of the eighteenth century Ambassador, who declared that it was his duty to lie abroad for his country's good. One of their most recent stories consists of an alleged statement signed by three members of the Petrograd Danish Legation, that they saw Jews firing at Poles at the Vilna Railway Station in the middle of April. A refutation of this story has been circulated by Professor Simonsen, of Copenhagen, who has been assured by the Danish authorities that all the members of the Danish Legation in Petrograd were recalled last December via Finland, and that the signatories of the statement were unknown to the Danish Government. I published these facts last week in the Westminster Gazette, and called upon the Secretary of the Polish Information Committee in London to explain the origin of the story. The latter was candid enough not to uphold the truth of the statement, and said that he had wired to Warsaw for an explanation.

er BR Rz The frequent questions that have been asked in the House of Commons concerning the outrages in Poland have so far not elicited any reply from the Government indicating that they fully realize the gravity of the situation and are resolved to insist upon proper satisfaction being done. But the value of the questions has consisted in publicly bringing to the notice of the Government some of the more flagrant features of the situation, and in impressing upon them the necessity of a thorough investigation and an equitable settlement. At first the Foreign Secretary, or rather his representative, announced that he had received a report on the subject from the British Minister in Warsaw, Sir Percy Wyndham, and that he was considering the advisability of its publication; but at a later stage he declared that he had only received interim telegraphic reports, and that it would be more convenient to wait until he had received a detailed report before proceeding to publication. He has since then stated that owing to the conflieting reports received from various sources concerning the pogroms, the British Government have decided to send out one or two special Commissioners to Poland to investigate these reports, and that the American Government would be asked if the British Commissioners could join the Amer-

Poland has now signed the special Treaty that safeguards the rights of national minorities. The reports that were being spread about an opposition to the Treaty being organized by the Conservative party under the direction of M. Dmowski were never taken seriously, since the latter himself was one of the signatories of the Treaty. How the Jewish clauses of the Treaty will be applied remains still to be seen, and I shall be agreeably surprised if the Council of the League of Nations will have no occasion to intervene. Despite the ardent and widespread longing among the Jews in Poland to migrate to Palestine, they will, owing to their numbers, be compelled to remain for decades to come in their native land, and hence the sooner amicable relations are restored between them and the Poles the better. The credit for the Jewish clauses of the Treaty is being taken by the Delegation of the Joint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association, with a somewhat grudging recognition of the services of Mr. Louis Marshall. This attitude is altogether unjust, as, had it not been for the memoranda presented by the Committee of Jewish Delegations, the Jewish clauses would have been much less satisfactory than they actually are. One has only to peruse the memorandum drawn up by Mr. Lucien Wolf for the Joint Foreign Committee, and published last February, to see what modest claims the latter were content to make on behalf of Polish Jewry. They did not even suggest that Jewish communities should be given a proportional quota from the State or municipal budgets for the upkeep of Jewish schools and other Jewish communal institutions.

It is certainly paradoxical that the delegates of British and French Jewry who went to Paris to plead the cause of East European Jewry refused to endorse the demands of the elected representatives of the latter. The Committee of Jewish Delegations comprised representatives of all—or