Jacob Lestschinsky – Excursions in Jewish Military History and Jewish Genealogy

Thoughts from The Frontier: Jewish Expressions in the U.S.S.R., by Jacob Lestschinsky (Jewish Frontier, December, 1948)

As described in Thoughts from The Frontier: Jacob Lestschinsky, Demographer and Scholar, this December 1948 essay – “Jewish Expressions in the U.S.S.R.” – is Lestschinsky’s final writing for the Jewish Frontier.

His previous essays for the journal were:

The Jews of Central Europe – June, 1938
The Fate of Six Million – July, 1938
Jews in Baltic Lands – August, 1938
In Fascist Rumania – September, 1938
Terror in Polish Universities – April, 1939

Though he could draw no definitive conclusions about the future, Lestschinsky was entirely realistic in his appraisal, whether explicit or implied, about the paired impacts of Communism and Stalinism upon the Jews of the Soviet Union, whether individually or collectively.

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The Jewish children of the USSR
are brought up with no knowledge whatever of their people’s history,
and acquire through their education no personal bond with its collective destiny.

* * * * * * *

…the reader is amazed to see how the Yiddish language
has been turned into an implement for estranging Jews from their past,
from Jews elsewhere in the world, and from all hope of a Jewish future.
The vocabulary of these productions is dry, wooden, destitute of any values or conceptions
that might convey overtones out of Jewish history and Jewish destiny.
Nowhere does one encounter such words as Exile, Redemption, Messiah, Destruction,
the prophet Elijah, the prophets generally,
Moses, the Temple, Jerusalem, Eretz Israel,
the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
Bible, Talmud, Shulkhan Arukh, Kabbalah,
Sabbath, the festivals, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Tishah B’Av, Simkhas Torah,
or any of the myriad expressions that lend color to the Yiddish language,
awakening time-honored memories and stirring up immemorial hopes.

* * * * * * *

… there is not a single piece about either of the two epochal events
that have dominated Jewish writing elsewhere,
in all tongues,
and in all forms of literature and journalism:
nothing about the catastrophe of European Jewry,
and nothing about the fight for the State of Israel.

* * * * * * *

… a poet like David Hofstein, who once wrote with such poignant feeling, in his own way,
about the Holy Spirit in Exile,
joining in the chorus of muteness,
and saying not a word about the Jewish tragedy,
though he writes about everything else under the sun – not excluding the panergyrics to Stalin.

* * * * * * *

“The sun itself might have been quenched,
Chocked by blood and ash and loam,
Had not the blooming of my home
The brilliant orb with radiance drenched.
For Stalin’s strength and Stalin’s will
Mine earth irradiate to its heart.”

______________________________

Jewish Expressions in the USSR
December, 1948

THE CULTURE which sustains nationality among most peoples has almost the power of natural necessity. Without taking any special pains, a Frenchman from the day of his birth is imbued with potent influences of his national tradition and contemporary environment. Jews are not in the fortunate position. The traditions and environment of other nationalities affect the Jews with almost the force of natural necessity; and to sustain his own cultural heritage and his sentiment of ethnic “belongingness,” he must apply himself deliberately to the maintenance of the Jewish language, schools, and literature.

What is the situation of Soviet Jewry in this respect? There are hardly any Jewish schools. Even those in Biro-Bidjan cannot pretend to constitute a school system in which all Jewish children would be educated in the Yiddish language. The Jewish children of the USSR are brought up with no knowledge whatever of their people’s history, and acquire through their education no personal bond with its collective destiny. Thus, is there is any element of culture cementing the Jewish group in the USSR today and holding out hope for their future as a Soviet nationality, it can only be the literature produced there in the Yiddish language. It is appropriate, therefore, to ask ourselves whether Yiddish literature, of the type that is being created in the USSR, makes for continuity, or if it makes precisely for the disintegration of Jewish ethnic existence.

I HAVE before me six Yiddish volumes recently issued in the USSR – five issues of the review Heimland, published in Moscow, and one volume of the review Der Shtern, published in Kiev. The latter book – 121 pages of stories, essays, and poetry – one approaches with the highest anticipation. Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, had in pre-way days a deeply-rooted Jewish community with strong traditions, one that had developed unique institutions, and today, according to Soviet sources, Kiev is the center of a region in which there should be a resettled Jewish population of around a million.

Turning to this review first, the reader is amazed to see how the Yiddish language has been turned into an implement for estranging Jews from their past, from Jews elsewhere in the world, and from all hope of a Jewish future. The vocabulary of these productions is dry, wooden, destitute of any values or conceptions that might convey overtones out of Jewish history and Jewish destiny. Nowhere does one encounter such words as Exile, Redemption, Messiah, Destruction, the prophet Elijah, the prophets generally, Moses, the Temple, Jerusalem, Eretz Israel, the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Bible, Talmud, Shulkhan Arukh, Kabbalah, Sabbath, the festivals, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Tishah B’Av, Simkhas Torah, or any of the myriad expressions that lend color to the Yiddish language, awakening time-honored memories and stirring up immemorial hopes.

The content of these writings is equally strange: not a single picture from specifically Jewish life. One might conclude that there is no specifically identifiable context of Jewish life to become the subject of literature. But even among the protagonists of these stories there is none who shows any trace of an individual Jewish quality, of specific Jewish concerns or experiences.

TAKING all six volumes together, there is not a single piece about either of the two epochal events that have dominated Jewish writing elsewhere, in all tongues, and in all forms of literature and journalism: nothing about the catastrophe of European Jewry, and nothing about the fight for the State of Israel. There is an occasional reference, to be sure, to one or another Jewish protagonist’s having lost his father or mother, but these facts are mentioned in such a markedly dry and off-hand manner that the impression created is of a purely individual misfortune, a mere incident. That this extraordinary silence is concerted, not accidental, becomes obvious enough when one sees a poet like David Hofstein, who once wrote with such poignant feeling, in his own way, about the Holy Spirit in Exile, joining in the chorus of muteness, and saying not a word about the Jewish tragedy, though he writes about everything else under the sun – not excluding the panergyrics to Stalin.

But if the slaughter of the Jews is occasionally referred to, in individual cases, there is utter blankness about Israel – verboten! Material about this new state, with its 700,000 Jews through whom Soviet policy may hope to score some points in its conduct of international affairs – this is an export commodity for the back pages of Einikeit, and occasionally for the front pages, when it can serve to embarrass England and the United States among Jews abroad. But, in poetry, criticism, or belles lettres – not a word. Israel is prohibited from entering the hearts of Soviet Jewry – at least through the medium of Yiddish literature.

Well, then, can one find anywhere in the reviews a piece about the Jews in any other country of the world? Not that, either. Even the Jews of Poland, Rumania, and Hungary – all countries with Communist governments – do not exist! No discussion in a Yiddish review of the very interesting Yiddish literature and Yiddish press that has arisen in neighboring, Communist Poland! The Soviet Jew must be purely and strictly Soviet, hermetically protected against any contact with Jewish culture beyond the border.

Let us overlook this idiosyncrasy and ask – What about Jewish culture in the Soviet Union itself? Nowhere any article on Jewish education, or any specific Jewish problem in the USSR! No cursory or incidental mention by any character in a story of the existence of matters of specifically Jewish interest.

Most revealing is the way these reviews portray the Jew in his contact with his non-Jewish neighbors. In the Ukraine, the local non-Jewish population was responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Jews. In Byelo-Russia the number was smaller because fewer Jews lived there, but in proportion the crime was non smaller. Did this orgy of murder by the neighbors of the Ukrainian and Byelo-Russian Jews leave any traces in the relations between Jew and non-Jew? Not a trace; current Soviet Yiddish literature is silent on this point. Rather, it is far from silent: it paints such an idyllic picture of love between Jew and non-Jew, that we should all celebrate the arrival of Messianic times – lambs lying down with lions, swords forged into ploughshares. At least, in Yiddish belles lettres in the Soviet Union all these prophecies have been realized. It is painful to read in Yiddish, in one’s own tongue, such a sycophantically aggressive wooing of those who so recently stepped their hands in Jewish blood. The harmony portrayed between Jew and Gentile in the Ukraine and Byelo-Russia is not a mere cooperation in common projects; it is intimate and personal – not only no difference of opinion, but no difference of feeling. Before such an overweening, offensive of love, the other party must certainly yield – until the next wave of pogroms…

According to this literature, there can hardly be a dozen guilty men in all Ukraine and Byelo-Russia. Even the though the life portrayed is largely, even mainly, lived in contact with Gentiles, rarely does one come across an anti-Semite, let alone a Jew-killer. All saints! The chauvinists and reactionaries who murdered the Jews – all gone. Are Soviet Jews compiling documentary materials on those distant events of 1941 to 1944 when certain obscure ruffians, strangers to the spirit of the Soviet Ukraine and Byelo-Russia, destroyed a matter of a million Jews or so in such remote places as Kiev and Berditchev, Odessa and Kharkov, Minsk and Gomel? We do not know. About three years ago, there were some references to such a project, but they quickly died down. Now, one hears no more about it. But the Yiddish belles letters of 1948 have quite other concerns than to evoke melancholy feelings among Jews because of a few exceptional Ukrainians and Byelo-Russians who, long, long ago, in 1941-1944, were misled by the Germans and took a small part in the extermination of the Jews. The theory of this literature is that all the Ukranians and Byelo-Russians whom Jews meet in kolkhoz and factory, in offices and in institutions, are too kind and pure to harm a hair on a Jew’s head; most of them, indeed, saved Jews from death in those old, unhappy days.

TO BE more specific, let us begin with no less a writer than the novelist David Bergelson, the author of Nokh Alemen and and Avrum Vokzal, in which Jewish nostalgia and Jewish individuality, the decay of ancient values and traditions, and anxiety over the clouded future of Jewishness achieve so fine an expression. That David Bergelson is no longer recognizable in the Soviet author writing on “Jewish” themes in Yiddish today. The fabula of his new novel, which is being printed serially in Heimland, concerns an American Jewish professor of Russian origin who journeys to Biro-Bidjan to seek out the sweetheart of his youth. Meanwhile, he observes the marvelous development of the new region, and the new types of Jews who live there. And they are indeed new types, particularly for the old Bergelson nothing identifiable as Jewish, beyond the name, but each one a true copy of the standard Soviet citizen. Their achievements are not celebrated as Jewish triumphs nor their setbacks grieved at as Jewish defeats, but in all respects their project is presented as one of the great USSR, directly.

What sort of poetry is printed in the Ukranian Yiddish review? Here certainly, in this most personal form of expression and in the journal of one of the densest Jewish populations, one might hope for a more intimate Jewishness. The first poem in the review, by Khanne Levin, is entitled “Our Sun,” and includes lines which read roughly as follows:

For the rest, the poem is a bouquet of curses for England and America and a shower of praises upon the sole savior of a world menaced by fascism – that is, Stalin’s Russia. The opening lines and some additional verses are sufficiently illustrative:

“You there, choking on the venom
Of hatred for my land,
‘Gainst whom do you now raise a hand?”
“For all that turns unto the light
Must go with us, does go with us.”

The same poetess contributes a poem on practically the same theme, entitled “For Human Joy”. Its joyous refrain runs as follows:

“O, blossom forth with joy and glee
For the happy dream of humanity!
And a bullet for him who first lets fly
In all the world a battle-cry!”

After this political poetry, we find a long story, the major item in the review, laying down, so to speak, its economic program. The story contains a romantic tale which we may ignore, because it is a minor and unilluminating element. The hero of the story is Ephraim, a Jew who had come back after five years of war to find his wife and children lost (how lost, is not explained), and, without taking even a few days to rest from the war effort, went back at once to find his old job in the tractor station, throwing himself into the work with unbounded energy. An older version of Ephraim is Kovel Gedalya, one other Jewish worker in the station. When a Ukrainian worker, Danilo, comes to work late once, because he is tired, Kovel Gedalya speaks as follows: “Well, Danilo, do you think Comrade Stalin doesn’t work day and night? To carry through such a war, a trifle. He was at all the fronts! Everywhere, he had to see things personally. He even came to us in the Urals, a mere trifle! And don’t forget, that he’s not so young anymore; but for him nothing is too hard – work is work. Now then, Danilo, get behind that hammer!” (p. 27) These two figures exemplify the function of the Jew in the Soviet economy, as portrayed by Soviet Yiddish letters – to stimulate effort, to be tireless, to labor unremittingly who brain and brawn, and to urge on others to do likewise. The heroes are two Jews among many non-Jews who set the dominant tone of their lives. But even when the two meet alone, or speak to the two Jewish women in the story, both of them from Ephraim’s hone-town, (the older one lost her husband and child, and the other, Malkah, whom Ephraim later marries, had not both her parents) they never speak as Jews, never mentioned that their personal tragedies might have something to do with their being Jews, or that there might be some among their non-Jewish fellow-workers who participated in the slaughter. In the climatic love scene between Ephraim and Malkah, they talk about “ordering new machines, shops, setting up workers’ clubs as light and airy as palaces.” (p. 49)

Other items in the review are “Spring 1948” by Moshe Pinchevsky, which hopes in verse for “thirty hundredweight” of grain her hectare and P. Kritichansky sings about “axes roaming the mighty woods,” and girls preparing “dams to cut in the forest.” This poet is also represented by two other poems, “By the River” and “In the Village,” in the latter of which “a cow stands thoughtfully still.”

We come, thus, to a story by a well-known Soviet author, H. Blaustein, bearing the intriguing title “His Dream.” What is the “dream” of a Jewish scientist in the Soviet Union? He dreams of success in breeding experiments with rabbits. The “resolute laborer of science,” David Vitkin, is afflicted momentarily with doubts concerning an experiment going on in a Soviet institute, but he summons up he reserves of resolution and labors on doggedly until he achieves his goal! There is a complication concerning a manuscript by an outstanding Soviet scientist who had been killed by the Germans, attempting to steal his discoveries. David finds the manuscript and completes the experiment, realizing the dream of the martyred Soviet genius.

THIS selection is representative of the Jewish quality of all the other stories and poems in the collection. But one additional piece deserves special attention. The author, Itzik Kipnis, is exceptional in that he was charged a while ago with chauvinism, and this story evidently represents an attempt at self-rehabilitation. He tells of Herschel Mechanik and his wife, Idda, who decide to adopt an orphan – “The government will not neglect them, but aren’t we also under an obligation?” says Herschel. In the orphanage, their enthusiasm rises and the childless couple return with two children. As to the little girl, it is not certain whether she is Jewish or Christian – her name is Zoya – but the boy’s name is Kostya, and his father was called Konstantin Pavlovitch Netchiporuk. And the director of the orphanage who entrusted these children to the Jewish couple is named Anna Antonovna. It is no doubt praiseworthy that a Jewish couple should extend its parental care to Soviet orphans without discrimination as to religion or nationality, but should not one of the parties involved be concerned as to the education of the children? Obviously not. They will be educated in an international spirit – to put it more concretely, in a Russian or even Ukrainian milieu. Herschel Mechanik’s house preserves none of the atmosphere of Jewish tradition, has no trace of Jewish individuality, no sign that it is not a Russian or Ukrainian home. Thus, Anna Antonovna, whose sentiments and loyalties are surely, if not those of Christian religion, at least those of Russian nationality, doesn’t even think it necessary to raise the question how Kostya, the son of Konstantin Pavlovitch Netchiporuk, will be brought up in the home of Herschel Mechanik.

The light this story casts on the depletion and lifelessness of Jewish culture in the USSR needs no further commentary. It is worth pointing, however, that Netchiporuk is very closely related indeed to the bloody Bogdan Khmelnitsky of seventeenth century fame, and the posterity of that notorious ancestor demonstrated very plainly only a few years ago how true they remain to the traditions of their national hero.

Thoughts from The Frontier: Terror in Polish Universities, by Jacob Lestschinsky (Jewish Frontier, April, 1939)

As noted in Thoughts from The Frontier: Jacob Lestschinsky, Demographer and Scholar, this essay – “Terror in Polish Universities”, from April of 1939 – is the last of Lestschinsky’s five pre-war writings published in the Jewish Frontier during the late 1930s. Here, Lestschinsky revisits Polish Jewry through the experiences of Jewish students in Polish academic institutions. Alas, the point all-too-soon became moot: The Second World War began in Europe five months after the publication of this article.

The previous essays are:

The Jews of Central Europe – June, 1938
The Fate of Six Million – July, 1938
Jews in Baltic Lands – August, 1938
In Fascist Rumania – September, 1938

Lestschinsky’s final Jewish Frontier essay, published three years after the Second World War’s end, is:

Jewish Expressions in the U.S.S.R. – December, 1948

______________________________

The Jewish students are determined not to yield any of the positions.
The decrease in their number is due not only to the limitations on enrollment
but also to the fact that some left the Polish universities
to attend those in foreign countries and others gave up their studies altogether.
The majority, however, remain in the universities,
attend the lectures and refuse the hoodlums the pleasure of having driven them out.
They remain standing for five and six hours during lectures;
they are often humiliated and beaten, but they do not yield.

______________________________

Terror in Polish Universities
April, 1939

“ATTACKS FROM the rear and ganging up against individuals have become normal occurrences among Polish students. The academic authorities and officials are being terrorized… Conscious deception is employed together with clubs, stink bombs, tear gas and iron weapons. Let those who originated this method of struggle not try to persuade us that the “holy war” against the Jews justifies even such means. A war of one people against another is also subject to laws of moral honor. No self-respecting army will dishonor the military name by designating as a soldier one who uses weapons to attack an unarmed person.

“Only a few years ago none would have believed that armed criminals would be free to attack defenseless persons in the institutions of higher learning.”

Who was the author of this speech? Who was it that dared to characterize the Polish students, the future leaders and lawmakers of Poland, in such terms?

The speech was not made by a Jew or a Socialist, nor even by a democrat. It was delivered by none other than the vice-minister of education, Professor Cornel Ojeski on April 5, 1937 and it was broadcast over the Polish radio.

But despite this one and similar speeches, recent years have witnessed the murder of many Jewish students and the wounding of hundreds in Polish universities. Ghetto benches were instituted in the class rooms and the Polish universities were transformed into such a purgatory for Jewish students that attending lectures is now fraught with mortal danger, in the literal meaning of the word.

The tragi-comedy in the Polish universities began soon after the jubilation over the newly found independence. In the very first years of Polish sovereignty, the “Nardowo” democrats, a pre-war anti-Semitic party, sponsored the demand for limitation on the number of Jews in the universities. The demand for legislation by the Sejm they supported by organized attacks on Jewish students in the schools. But Poland was at that time dependent on France and Poincare intervened to prevent the liberated country from taking the shameful step. Those were golden days for Polish Jewry and they are now forgotten. As the years went by, the attacks increased, but until 1933 they were still of a sporadic nature. But since that year the attacks became more clearly organized and consistent and also more murderous and dangerous in scope. No less than twenty-five Jewish students were killed during the past 5-6 years; several hundred were seriously wounded; two students became insane after being subjected to several attacks and hundreds of students voluntarily left the universities. But the 4,000 still remaining, are conducting a heroic struggle against the shameful segregation and the ghetto benches that were instituted in their “alma maters,” and against the return of medievalism in schools where only 25 years ago Jewish students offered their lives in the fight against the Czarist regime and for the liberation of Poland.

The first demand of the anti-Semites for a “numerus clausus” has long ago been fulfilled. The following figures illustrate how subserviently the government carries out the commands of the “armed criminals” in the universities of free Poland. In 1933 there were 51,770 students in the Polish universities. Of this number, 9,694, or 18.7% were Jews. Since 91% of all the students came from urban families and the Jews constitute 27% of the urban population, it is obvious that the Jews were entitled to a much higher percentage. That would be true even if we were to abandon the natural and healthy principle of free and unhampered choice of professions by the citizens and substitute in its stead the dangerous and abnormal point of view that people should enter professional life on a national basis and not on the basis of individual abilities.

In 1935, only 7,114 Jewish students remained and in 1938 their number still further decreased to 4,791 or 9.9% of the entire student body. The demands of the “armed criminals” on the Polish campus were thus completely fulfilled.

But appetite increases with the eating and anti-Semites are never satisfied. During the last semester a new program was embarked on – the complete elimination of Jewish students. The following documents testify to the progress that has been made in the direction of the ideals of those whose hands are smeared with the blood of murdered and wounded colleagues. The dean of the Warsaw Polytechnicum issued the following declaration at the beginning of the last semester:

“In view of various false rumors, I wish to inform that in 1937 6.3% of the students enrolled were Jews; in 1938, 5.6% and this year only 4.7%. On the basis of the order of the dean during the previous year, those who do not wish to sit together with Jewish students, will be enabled to do so. That order clearly indicated what is to be done in case one does not adjust himself to it.”

Such are the words of a teacher to the hooligans. He calms them with the assurance that their program is gradually being carried out. By now there are certainly no more than 4,000 Jewish students, but since the number admitted grows smaller each year, the “ideal” state will soon be attained. However, this concession seems to be inadequate and the dean hints that there are additional ways of getting rid of Jews – ejecting them if they refuse to occupy the ghetto benches. Since the dean knows very well that the Jews refuse to occupy these benches, his remark must be interpreted as a direct incitement against his own students.

But the fact that there still remain 4,000 Jewish students, does not sufficiently clarify the situation. It is also essential to know into what colleges they are admitted. Now Jew may become a professor or high school teacher in Poland. Of the 1,672 professors and instructors in Poland in 1936, only 36 were Jews. Some of these died since that time. The ones that remain, have kept their positions from pre-way days when these institutions were Austrian universities. No new Jewish instructors were engaged since that time. The older ones die of heart attacks and the day is not far off when Polish universities will be entirely free of Jews. It is no exaggeration when we say that many Jews in Poland die of heart attacks, professors included. Thus it is well known that the world famous Jewish brain specialist, Professor Rosen of the Vilna University, died of a heart attack when he saw his own daughter standing during a lecture of her father together with the other Jewish students who refused to occupy the ghetto benches. This professor, who had been entrusted with the examination of the brain of Pilsudski, was a one hundred percent assimilationist who never even hinted that he belonged to the oppressed and persecuted Jewish group. His heart failed when he was forced to taste of ghetto segregation.

The few Jews that are allowed to register are admitted to courses in philology and philosophy, courses which offer nothing practical. From medicine and law, professions in which individual ability and efforts are very important, Jews are almost entirely excluded. During last semester’s registration at the University of Cracow, no Jews were admitted to medical and pharmacy courses; 20 were registered in the school of philosophy; 3 in chemistry. In the University of Lemberg 3 were accepted into the medical school (out of 130 who applied), none were admitted to pharmacy courses, four were registered in the law school (out of 400 students enrolled) and 17 in the humanities courses (out of 150 enrolled).

In order to give a clearer picture of everyday life on a Polish campus, I will quote at length from an interpellation introduced in the Polish Sejm by the Jewish deputy, Dr. Sommerstein:

“On Friday, November 18 (1938), drawings of bridge designs were made in the main building of the Polytechnicum of Lemberg. The exercises ended at five P.M. A group of five Jewish students were the first to reach the door but Polish students barred their way and did not allow them to leave through the main gate. They finally succeeded in breaking their way through. The other Jewish students could not leave through the gate which was occupied by a larger number of Poles. The Jewish student, Berthold Meister, went up to the second floor and warned his colleagues not to go to the gate. A large group of Polish students meanwhile gathered in the office of the dean. Two Jewish students, Deutscher and Kloper, hid in the office of Professor Brotry where they remained until 9 P.M. The remaining seven Jews persuaded the assistant to give them shelter in the office of Instructor Chmilewitch. They were warned to maintain perfect silence and to put out the lights so that none might suspect their presence. But the door of the office was suddenly broken open by a large group of Polish students. The attack did not last long. When the light was turned on it was found that of the Jewish students Proweler was lying unconscious from his wounds; Lehrer was bleeding profusely from wounds in the abdomen and head; Meister was severely beaten about the head; Sheftler was beaten about the head and had a wounded on his arm; Ruf was bruised as a result of being kicked; Roichbergen was lightly wounded. Proweler died of his wounds a few hours later.

This interpellation in the Sejm also established the fact that the university authorities were aware of the impending attack but provided no defense. The event described was the second one of this sort during the same month. Two weeks earlier the Jewish student Carl Zelermeier was killed and three others were seriously wounded. It is true that this murder evoked the anger of a large number of Christians. At the funeral there were delegations from labor organizations and also from democratic non-Jewish groups.

The events described above are typical of all Polish universities during the past 5-6 years. Fortunately, they do not always culminate in death, but the order of the occurrences, attacks by hundreds on small groups, isolating the Jewish students in remote rooms, clubbing, stabbing with knives, beating with iron instruments – these have become normal events on Polish campuses. As soon as a lecture is over, the Jewish students hasten to the exit, but they are not always successful. Jews go about in groups, for numbers facilitate breaking through and self-defense. However, being a minority, they are beaten and murdered nevertheless.

What is the attitude of the professors?

The following is an illustration of their attitude. A professor of mathematics delivered a lecture. A Jewish student arrived after the lecture commenced and remained standing on the side. The Polish students demanded that he take his place on the special benches assigned to Jews. This he refused to do. The professor then interrupted his lecture and left the auditorium. The Poles ejected the Jewish student and also beat him. Then the professor returned and resumed his discourse. The attitude is typical of the majority of Polish professors. There exists a minority of about one hundred professors who protest against the attacks and the ghetto benches. Among the latter the professors Michalewitch, Kotorbinski and the ex Prime Minister Bartel, distinguished themselves. In a sharp denunciation of the student hooligans which he delivered to the Polish Senate, Bartel related that a questionnaire revealed that 48% of the students had never heard of Richard Wagner and 58% did not know who Poincare was. He also told that during the last semester he could not deliver 36% of his lectures because of rioting in the class room. Because of this speech Bartel was threatened with death. Within the university a movement of protest was organized against him which necessitated closing all the high schools in Lemberg.

A small group of Polish Socialists courageously fight the hoodlums and there have also been sacrifices of life on their part. One Polish student died of his wounds and several were wounded. The majority of the Polish students remain indifferent and participate neither in the attacks nor in the struggle against them. A large minority is actively, and almost exclusively, engaged in the attacks. But this minority commands a body of students far exceeding the number of Jews.

The Jewish students are determined not to yield any of the positions. The decrease in their number is due not only to the limitations on enrollment but also to the fact that some left the Polish universities to attend those in foreign countries and others gave up their studies altogether. The majority, however, remain in the universities, attend the lectures and refuse the hoodlums the pleasure of having driven them out. They remain standing for five and six hours during lectures; they are often humiliated and beaten, but they do not yield.

During recent weeks the Jewish Socialist and democratic parties organized a campaign of protest against the ghetto benches. This protest is actively supported by the Polish Socialist party and also by small groups of Polish liberals. We must note with regret, however, that liberals are becoming ever more rare in Poland.

We have now reached the most important aspect of this tragic situation – the attitude of the government. The Polish government can honestly boast of more hypocrisy than any other government in the world. It has so far not passed even a single law against Jewish students. The order concerning ghetto benches in the schools was issued by the authorities of the universities which are autonomous. The government has not organized any attacks on Jewish students but it also does nothing to defend them because it cannot send its policemen into the universities. The universities enjoy self government and Poland strictly observes the constitution. If the universities refuse to admit Jewish students – the government may not intervene – because of the constitution. We could cite tens of speeches, like the one quoted in the begging of this article, which are offered as proof that the government is innocent. What can it do? It is powerless against the written word of the constitution. It does not know how to infringe even on the least letter of the constitution; it has no experience in this field.

It is true that Poland has experience in changing entire constitutions, but that is different from encroaching on the autonomy of the universities and sending a few policemen to deprive the student hooligans of their knives. An entire constitution may be discarded – as was already done in rejuvenated Poland – and a new one may be written. But it would be too much to ask that the government transgress against a single paragraph of the law of the land. Of course, if a Communist is to distribute a few leaflets on the eve of the first of May, the government will find ways and justifications to break a hundred paragraphs of constitutional rights. But that would mean defending the entire state including the constitution. It is clear that that would be a different matter. But the Polish government stands in no danger of collapse as a result of twenty-five Jewish students being murdered; the state will not be affected as a result of hundreds being wounded. How then should one expect it to infringe on the constitution in such insignificant cases?

The Polish government therefore remains calm. From time to time it sends one of its two-faced representatives to deliver a fiery speech. After that happens, the university authorities know that they can proceed against the Jews and the armed “heroes” feel that they can continue to beat and to kill their Jewish colleagues for an entire year without any intervention.

A few weeks after the minister of education delivered the speech cited in the beginning, in which he declared that he considered it impossible to issue any order concerning ghetto benches, the university authorities promulgated such a decree and the “armed criminals” began a simultaneous campaign in all the schools, with clubs and iron bars for the total elimination of Jewish students.

The Polish government remains true to the written constitution.*

*The figures concerning the number of students and professors are taken from the official publication of the statistical bureau – Statistyka Szkolnictwa; 1936-38.

Thoughts from The Frontier: In Fascist Rumania, by Jacob Lestschinsky (Jewish Frontier, September, 1938)

As described in Thoughts from The Frontier: Jacob Lestschinsky, Demographer and Scholar, this essay – “In Fascist Rumania”, from September of 1938 – is the fourth of Lestschinsky’s six writings published in the Jewish Frontier from the late 1930s through 1948.

The previous essays are:

The Jews of Central Europe – June, 1938
The Fate of Six Million – July, 1938
Jews in Baltic Lands – August, 1938

The subsequent two essays are:

Terror in Polish Universities – April, 1939
Jewish Expressions in the U.S.S.R. – December, 1948

______________________________

In suggesting that anti-Jewish animosity was increasing in Rumania due to positive economic changes, Jacob Lestschinsky’s essay anticipates ideas expressed in Mihail Sebastian’s (Mendel Hechter’s) 1934 novel For Two Thousand Years, as described by Dr. Ruth Wisse in her 2017 Mosaic book review and essay of A Romanian Jew’s Private Judgment of a World Bent on Condemning Him, which she states, “…brilliantly chart[s] the psychological effects of anti-Semitism on both its perpetrators and its victims, a newly translated 1934 novel outdoes even such master analysts as Freud and Proust.”

______________________________

The situation in Rumania during recent years
proves that anti-Semitism may develop not only as a result of economic crises
but also as a byproduct of positive economic changes.

* * * * * * *

The Jewish citizen of a fascist country is thus dependent on the good graces of the rulers
and if he would gain their favor
he must discharge his Jewish help and replace it with Rumanian.

* * * * * * *

Some time ago I had an opportunity to speak with a group of young Rumanian Jews.
To my query regarding their condition
they replied with a sigh and a pessimistic shake of the hand.
The meaning of the sigh was:
Where could we escape to?
Where can one get work?
This is the unspoken question which torments 200,000 young Jews in Rumania.

______________________________

In Fascist Rumania
September, 1938

RUMANIA IS a broad land inhabited by 18 million people. Its provinces differ widely in their economic, political and cultural past. Bessarabia, which was acquired from Russia, differs from the lands that were obtained from Austria and Hungary; the original territories of Rumania are a separate subject for study. The various provinces that comprise the Rumanian state have not yet fused into a unit. National minorities constitute 35% of the population in the country and in the cities they reach a high of 45%. The Rumanian population is the most backward relative to its development and is noted for its conservatism.

The one million Jews that live in Rumania constitute 6% of the total population but in the cities their percentage is much greater. Before the war they were 65% of the population of Kishinev; the non-Jewish minority was comprised of Russians, Ukrainian and Moldavians. At the time we hoped that under a democratic regime the Jews would assume the leadership in the government of cities like Kishinev. As late as 1925 they still comprised 60% of the population; today only 50%. The same holds true for Jassy. In 1925 Jews accounted for 60% of the population and today only for 48%. In Czernowitz they were 47% in 1925 and 38% today. The process of relative diminution in the cities if characteristic of all the countries of eastern Europe including the Soviet Union. The cause underlying this process is also the same in all these countries – the urbanization of the majority nationalities and their adoption of western European culture. The tragedy of eastern European Jewry consists in this transition in urban trades because it involves the displacement of the minority which developed these countries and fostered their trade and industry.

But it is not an easy task to displace the Jews from trade in a city like Kishinev where 80% of the commerce is handled by them. The same holds true for Jassy, Czernowitz and scores of other cities and towns. It is a difficult task to displace the Jews from the textile industry two-thirds of which is in their hands. This industry is relatively new in Rumania and the non-Jews, particularly the Rumanians, are not yet acquainted with its operation. In a land of forests, such as Rumania is, where the export of lumber occupies an important part in the economy of the country it is dangerous to replace the Jewish lumber merchants by others before the latter have mastered the trade and have made contacts with forest workers. A similar situation prevails in many other Rumanian industries. The main cause for the downfall of the Goga government was that it attempted to introduce in a backward country – where most of the inhabitants cannot read nor write, have no capital and lack connections with foreign markets – a type of fascism which can only exist in countries with a well developed industry and commerce and with a high cultural level. But we should not deceive ourselves into believing that since 100% fascism faded in Rumania, partial fascism is also bound to fail. The masses of Rumanians have turned to the cities and are eager to engage in all urban callings. This movement towards urbanization largely explains the growth of social anti-Semitism which is always more dangerous than governmental anti-Semitic measures.

The situation in Rumania during recent years proves that anti-Semitism may develop not only as a result of economic crises but also as a byproduct of positive economic changes. During recent years Rumania has enjoyed a measure of prosperity unusual in these days. Its wheat crops have increased by 30% since 1930. Prices of wheat have also been higher during the past four years than they have been previously. The export of wheat accounts for one-third of the total Rumanian exports and in 1937 it amounted to 30 billion Lei.

The textile industry which was largely developed by Jews from Poland has made such rapid strides forward that it can supply almost the entire demand of the domestic market in Rumania. In 1927 there were only 5,300 looms but by 1938 the number has increased to 20,0000 looms. Textile imports have dropped to one-tenth. Textile production rose from 6 billion lei in 1932 to 10 billion in 1937. It is also noteworthy that in most of the textile plants a great number of Jews were employed and the office staffs were entirely Jewish.

But despite the development of industry which absorbed scores of thousands of workers, despite the phenomenal growth of trade and of the government apparatus which employs Rumanians only, social anti-Semitism and the process of displacement of Jews has been increasing steadily. How is this to be explained? It is very simple. The initiative of the Jews in developing trade and industry has not impoverished the villagers. On the contrary, it has increased their economic welfare and it has aroused in them a striving for a still higher standard of living. Thus we find that in prewar Czernowitz there were 173 doctors, 114 of whom were Jews, and 194 Jewish lawyers out of 228. Today the situation is different. The positions of the Jewish doctors and lawyers are now occupied by Rumanians and Ukrainian who had left the villages. Before the war the Jews accounted for 30% of the lower officials and 15% of the higher ones. Today there are no Jewish government officials. The younger Rumanians, the sons of the officials that displaced the Jews, are turning to trade and industry. Since the economic development of the country does not keep pace with the increase in population, the competition for employment and sources of income becomes increasingly keener. During the past twenty years the population of Rumania has increased by four million. With no outlet in the way of mass employment, the villagers are streaming into the cities. There they find the Jews employed in officers and shops and as owners of stores. The Rumanians announce frankly that they intend to seize these sources of employment and income, and in our times might makes right. This is the true meaning of the regulation which requires all employers to employ at least 80% “pure” Rumanians in their plants. If the Rumanians have not yet developed sufficiently – like the Germans – to be able to displace the Jews from trade and industry, they can at least seize the jobs of the Jewish workers and officials. Meanwhile they are satisfied with 80% – until they will acquire the necessary training to displace all the Jews. The method of percentages which has been introduced in Hungary and Rumania clearly illustrates the nature of fascism; it does not affect the rich Jewish merchant and industrialist as long as these are needed to operate their enterprises. It Is true that the Goga government, which followed a 100% anti-Semitic policy, cause complete anarchy in Rumanian economic and financial life and it was soon defeated. But the followers of Goga are more cautious and therefore more dangerous. Their strangulation of Jewish economic life is more gradual but it is sure to bring ruin. It is true that the plan of Goga to deprive half a million Jews of their citizenship has been discarded but several tens of thousands will be deprived of their rights. The revision of citizenship still proceeds and 50-60 thousand Jews are in danger of expulsion from the country for the sole sin of being born Jews.

New labor laws are also gradually but energetically being enforced. As a result of these laws unemployment among Jews has greatly increased. To our great shame we must admit that there are Jews who hasten to displace their Jewish employees by Rumanians in order to win the favor of the authorities and to save their enterprises and their profits. The authorities have the right to issue licenses to engage in export and import trade, to start new enterprises or to liquidate existing ones. The Jewish citizen of a fascist country is thus dependent on the good graces of the rulers and if he would gain their favor he must discharge his Jewish help and replace it with Rumanian. Small scale fascism such as exists in Hungary and Rumania is thus directed primarily against the Jewish proletariat and the impoverished middle class.

The “numerus clausus” has long been in effect in the Rumanian universities. During recent months the lawyers’ federations have been busy expelling their Jewish members. When we remember with what enthusiasm Jewish lawyers were expelled from the courts after the first decrees of the Goga government, we may feel certain that this latest aim will be “successfully” attained. Jewish doctors are not allowed in state and municipal institutions and are on the verge of starvation. Only a few specialists still retain their positions.

Forty to forty-five per cent of the Jews in Bessarabia have been forced to depend on relief as a result of these measures. The mortality rate among the Jews has risen appallingly while the birth rate has dropped. Thirty-five per cent of the Jews in Bukowina are dependent on relief. The poverty of the others is great and it affects segments of the population that hitherto supported Jewish charitable institutions.

Some time ago I had an opportunity to speak with a group of young Rumanian Jews. To my query regarding their condition they replied with a sigh and a pessimistic shake of the hand. The meaning of the sigh was: Where could we escape to? Where can one get work? This is the unspoken question which torments 200,000 young Jews in Rumania.

This is the fourth and last of a series of article on the situation of the Jews in the eastern and central European countries.

Thoughts from The Frontier: Jews in Baltic Lands, by Jacob Lestschinsky (Jewish Frontier, August, 1938)

As described in Thoughts from The Frontier: Jacob Lestschinsky, Demographer and Scholar, this essay – “Jews in Baltic Lands”, from August of 1938 – is the Third of Lestschinsky’s six writings published in the Jewish Frontier from the late 1930s through 1948.

The previous essays are:

The Jews of Central Europe – June, 1938
The Fate of Six Million – July, 1938

The subsequent essays are:

In Fascist Rumania – September, 1938
Terror in Polish Universities – April, 1939
Jewish Expressions in the U.S.S.R. – December, 1948

______________________________

Calmly, without tumult and in a “civilized” manner
the Jews were brought to a condition
where emigration offers the only escape from their predicament.

______________________________

Jews in Baltic Lands
August, 1938

LATVIA OFFERS an excellent example of how a Jewish community may be destroyed without tumult and violence, without breaking heads and smashing windows and even without the hysteria of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitic agitation is practically forbidden in Latvia. The supreme and only ruler of this small country is acquainted with that law and he can manipulate it in such a manner as to avoid entirely the “glamour” of anti-Semitic agitation.

Ninety-thousand Jews live in Latvia today and they comprise five per cent of the total population. In 1897 there were 142 thousand Jews in Latvia and they made up 7 ½ per cent of the inhabitants. As recently as 1938 there were 95 thousand Jews in the country and their number is constantly diminishing. The ruling Latvian majority is growing at the expense of the Jews and of other national minorities. Whereas the Latvians constituted only 68% of the population before the war and they were almost exclusively engaged in agriculture, they comprise 76% of the population today and they form the majority in many cities. Two causes contributed to this shift in the population: the greater natural increase among the Latvians as compared to that of the Jews and the Germans and the emigration of Jews from the country. The percentage of Jews in the cities is also decreasing. Before the war they accounted for 40% of the population in Dwinsk; in 1925, 31%; in 1935 only 24%. This change in Dwinsk is characteristic of the trend in other cities.

In the pre-war years, the cites were the backbone of Jewish economic and cultural life in Latvia because in many of these they were the largest single national group. In Dwinsk, for example, the non-Jewish 60% of the population was composed of four different nationalities: Russians, Latvian, Poles and Lithuanians. Under a democratic regime, such as was contemplated before the war, the Jews would have had a majority in the city administration. But reality did not concede form to plan. The Latvians are the sole rulers and it is their policy to displace the national minorities.

Latvia instituted a large-scale agrarian reform program. Of the three million hectares (1 hectare is 10,000 sq. meters) which were previously in the possession of large German landowners, two million were sub-divided among the Latvian peasants. In time it became clear, however, that the peasants who received land and financial assistance, vocational school and aid in marketing their produce, these same peasants who profited from the reform measures became the stronghold of reaction and the supporters of an unbridled chauvinist policy. The sons of those well to do peasants attend the universities. Relatively there are today more university students in Latvia than there are in England. The new generation of educated peasants’ sons swarmed into all the urban trades and professions. With peasant stubbornness and lack of regard they began to displace the national minorities. Over 40% of the student body in Latvia consists of peasants’ sons. The government grants them subsidies and positions even before they are graduated. This phenomenon of the spread of education among the farming population could have been greeted as desirable if the newly educated Latvians had recognized the right of other nationalities to earn a livelihood.

The process of displacing Jews from the professions began even before the triumph of fascism in Latvia. Under Czarist rule there were no Jewish officials in the country. During the honeymoon of the Latvian republic, a few scores of Jews were given official positions for the reason that there were not enough Latvians capable of filling the posts. Later the Jewish officials were discharged. Among the 30 thousand government officials in Latvia, there were never more than 150 Jews. Today there is not a single Jewish official in the country. Even during the years 1930-1933 no Jewish doctor could be employed in the government hospitals and clinics. With the rise of the dictatorship, the majority of those Jews who still had posts were dismissed and only a few indispensable specialists were retained.

The trend towards commercial callings was increasing as a natural process but the dictatorship accelerated it by means of special privileges for the Latvian businessmen and by placing hindrances in the path of the Jewish traders. The first step of the government was to take over the trade in agricultural produce. This measure affected all those who were engaged in this trade. Not only the Jewish exporters but also the small Jewish grain dealers in the small towns and the employees of the export firms were adversely affected. The government agencies which conducted the trade in agricultural produce did not employ even a single Jew. In 1937 the government paid 150 million Lat to farmers for their produce. The total Latvian exports of that year amounted to 261 million Lat. Nearly all the agricultural exports were handled by the government, and yet this branch of trade was previously almost entirely in the hands of Jews. When the government assumes control of any branch of trade, the laborers in that branch are affected even more than the traders and manufacturers. The government refrains from employing Jews even in the unskilled labor of loading and hauling. Many Jews in Latvia heretofore derived their sustenance from such unskilled labor.

The credit institutions are now almost entirely in the hands of the government. In 1936 it granted loans to the extent of 405 million Lat, 76% of the total credit extended in the country in that year. Latvian merchants and manufacturers receive loans at lower interest rates and with less collateral than is required of Jewish entrepreneurs.

But the process of industrialization is still proceeding at a slow pace among the Latvians. They lack the necessary training, the minimum capital outlay and the initiative which this new field of enterprise requires. The government therefore began to take over the factories. The administration of Ulmanis passed a number of laws which enable it to take over any industrial establishment. Latvian law decrees that the government may consider any industrial establishment to be sufficiently important for the interests of the state to give it the right of buying it. In 1936-37 this law was applied to take over a number of Jewish owned factories which also employed Jewish laborers. During these two years, plants manufacturing wagons, machines, cigarettes, chocolate and beer were taken over. The Jewish owned textile plant “Riga-Willa” and three other factories were also recently acquired by the government which thus deprives the Jews of a branch of industry which they founded and developed in independent Latvia.

Five years ago, when it became difficult for young Jews to gain admittance to the university and to look forward to a career in the professions, many of them tuned to physical labor. In the textile factory in Riga I met scores of Jewish workers many of whom were graduated from high schools. During the past five years, this trend toward physical labor has become even more accentuated since prospects in commerce and in the professions have become even poorer than they were. Now the Latvian government denies Jewish youth even this outlet. One can forsee that the Jewish laborers as well as the Jewish officials and technically skilled employees will be dismissed soon. The economic policies of the government and its actions in the past clearly indicate such a course.

According to recent information the Latvian government is about to inaugurate the following industrial enterprises: a textile plant at an investment of eight million Lat; lumber and coke plants for four million Lat; peat works for 3 ½ million Lat; fish distributing depots for 2 million Lat and a bakery for 600 thousand Lat. The appetite grows with the eating. The more deeply the government becomes involved in commercial and industrial ventures, the greater is its desire to control additional economic fields. In the near future private enterprise may be displaced entirely. We would not feel concerned for the private Jewish entrepreneur it the actions of the government were not of such a nationalist nature. In practice it takes everything out of the hands of the national minorities and hands it to the Latvians. Without exaggeration we may say that over half the trade and industry in Latvia is now in the hands of the government and this process is still proceeding at an increasing pace. While the Jewish industrialists and businessmen receive compensation from the government for their plants, the Jewish workers and intellectuals remain without work and without any prospects for the future.

It is therefore not surprising that the Jews of this small country, where no discriminatory laws exist and where, in theory, the Jews enjoy equal rights, are panicky and frantic. Jewish youth is afraid lest the government appropriate a few plants and dismisses them from their jobs.

We did not analyze the cooperatives in Latvia which are supported by the government with credit, special privileges and freedom from taxation. Often one receives the impression that the cooperatives are no more than government stores operated by government officials. No independent activity on the part of the people is noticeable in this field.

Since the political situation in the country is stagnant and there are no prospects for political changes, the Jewish citizens are despairing. Their only hope lies in emigration. It is the dream of every Jew and especially of the youth to emigrate, but where?

Latvia is a small country with a population of less than two million. It is easy to gain control of the economy of the land and this explains the rapid and successful action of the government. The Latvians are a cultured and capable people who adapt themselves rapidly to new trades. They learned much from the Germans when they were subjected to them. Jewish merchants never constituted more than one third of the businessmen in the country. Their share in the industry was even smaller. In parts of the country, as in Riga, there was a “pale of settlement” for Jews before the war. During the twenty years of Latvian independence there came into existence large groups of educated and technically trained people. As a result it was very easy to displace the Jews from their economic positions without expressly legislating against them. Calmly, without tumult and in a “civilized” manner the Jews were brought to a condition where emigration offers the only escape from their predicament.

This is the third of a series of article on the situation of the Jews in the central European countries.

Thoughts from The Frontier: The Fate of Six Million, by Jacob Lestschinsky (Jewish Frontier, July, 1938)

As described in Thoughts from The Frontier: Jacob Lestschinsky, Demographer and Scholar, this essay – “The Fate of Six Million”, from July of 1938 – is the second of Lestschinsky’s six writings published in the Jewish Frontier from the late 1930s through 1948.

The previous essay is:

The Jews of Central Europe – June, 1938

The subsequent four essays are:

Jews in Baltic Lands – August, 1938
In Fascist Rumania – September, 1938
Terror in Polish Universities – April, 1939
Jewish Expressions in the U.S.S.R. – December, 1948

Being that this essay deals with the history of Polish Jewry, Dr. Ruth R. Wisse’s Mosaic essay from December of 2015 – Jews and Other Poles – is highly relevant, for it unflinchingly explores the complicated intersection between the past and the present.

______________________________

The above cited facts combine into a horrifying picture
of the hopeless future facing Polish Jewry.
The situation is such while theoretically they still enjoy equal rights.
No explicit anti-Jewish laws have been enacted yet
and the process of displacement has not yet been organized on a governmental scale.
The evil must therefore be recognized before it has attained its final growth.
Even the present economic displacement is better than complete economic expulsion
which would be tantamount to expulsion from the country.

______________________________

The Fate of Six Million
July, 1938

THE 3 ¼ MILLION Jews that live in Poland constitute one-fifth of the Jewish population of the world but culturally and nationally Polish Jewry is of even greater importance than its numerical strength would lead one to believe. Polish Jewry is today the greatest reservoir of organic, throbbing Jewish life; it not only preserves the heritage of the past but it also grows and becomes rejuvenated. Compared with the poverty of our national life in other parts of the globe, Polish Jewry is still – despite its economic deterioration – a fertile source of stimulation to Jews throughout the world.

The total population of Poland today is 34 ½ million. This figure marks an increase of 8 million people during the past 20 years. During the same period the population of Great Britain increased only by 3 million and British laborers earn on the average three times as much as Polish workers. In the past eight years the Polish population increased ten per cent while production in the country decreased 12% during the same time.

The poverty of the peasantry and the laboring masses in Poland is well known and even those fortunate enough to be officials find themselves in straitened circumstances. Most of the officials earn less than 30 zloty a week (six dollars) yet this salary is high when compared with the earnings of the workers and especially of craftsmen who work at home. The latter constitute a high percentage among the Jews and in Warsaw they make up 80% of the 75,000 Jewish workers of that city.

On the basis of information gleaned from various sources we obtain the following picture of the economic situation of Polish Jewry. 1,240,000 Jews (38%) are dependent on relief. These constitute the lowest stratum of the Jewish economic pyramid. About half of this number are totally dependent on relief while the other half earn only enough for some of the barest necessities and must fall back on outside help to obtain clothes and to pay for medical aid in case of sickness. These families never have enough food and during the winter they suffer from cold. Usually such families possess only one pair of shoes and one overcoat that is used alternately by all the children. Children of ten years help at home and in the store and children of 12 years already look for work. This section of the population provides cheap labor that can compete with coolies. The shops are crowded with children of from 12 to 15 years of age who depress the wage level and hinder the struggle for better working conditions.

The second stratum of Polish Jewish economic pyramid contains about one million Jews who barely eke out an existence. They do not require outside aid but they are unable to pay to the community council even the small annual tax of ten zloty (two dollars) and most of them only pay half that sum. Even minor economic dislocations make them dependent on relief. They live in inadequate houses and meat is a rare item in their diet. Often they require the assistance of loan societies. The younger people see no future for themselves and are anxious to leave their homes at the earliest opportunity. They provide the largest contingent of candidates for emigration. They are ready to migrate anywhere only to escape their hopeless situation. This youth provides the bulk of the Jewish Communists who are ready to risk their lives in the Polish prisons; the ranks of the Chalutzim who are ready to engage in the most difficult labor in preparation for a new, even though difficult and dangerous, life in Palestine are also recruited from this element. An aim in life and useful work is uppermost in their minds. Sons of artisans and store keepers, these young people are not so hungry but that they still have energy left to participate in political parties and to plan for the future, but they are desperate enough to risk their lives for a higher purpose in life. This group therefore provides many idealists and people ready for self sacrifice.

The upper economic stratum contains about one million Jews who are well situated. About fifty thousand of these can be considered wealthy and they enjoy a comfortable and even luxurious life.

The distribution of the Jewish population in Poland in the various economic pursuits can give us an insight into their prospects for the future. One million Jews engage in commerce. Half of these are peddlers and small store keepers; 250,000 are employed in commercial establishments and the remaining 250,000 operate medium and large scale business enterprises.

About half a million Jews engaging in commerce and threatened with economic ruin. No less than 50,000 small stores and open air stands were opened by Poles during the past five years. The number of Jewish stores in the villages is decreasing, and from some villages they were banished altogether. Jews were murdered in more than forty Polish villages during the past two years and in such instances the remaining Jews flee the village. In some villages the peasants showed their kindness to their Jewish neighbors by helping them to load their possessions on wagons and then escorting them – with a hail of stones.

An investigation conducted in thirty villages in eastern Galicia disclosed the following situation: 134 Jewish families lived in these villages in 1932; only 77 families remained in 1937. In 1932 Jews owned 62 stores but they owned only 16 stores in 1937. Poles increased the number of their stores from 14 in 1932 to 112 in 1937. In place of the 46 Jewish stores that were closed there appeared 65 stores owned by Poles. These figures are illuminating in that they indicate that there has appeared an element in the Polish villages which is forced to turn to commerce despite the decline in business.

It has been pointed out before that an estimated 8 million Polish villages are forced to turn to urban trades and to commerce. Only a small number of these turn to commerce but the Polis merchants receive credits from government and municipal banks. The boycott committees picketing the Jewish stores also aid the Polish store keepers to dislodge their competitors. The constant riots primarily affect the Jewish peddlers and small business men. We will admit, however, that even without pogroms and boycott pickets Jews would be displaced from business although at a much slower pace. The situation of the small merchants is desperate and the day is not far off when even the medium and wholesale Jewish dealers will be affected.

The younger generation of the business class has despaired of commerce and is dreaming of emigration, of factory work and even of difficult unskilled work. Of course we should not bemoan this tendency to leave trade for labor but the fact remains that of those displaced from commerce not more than one out of ten succeeds in finding employment. In the coming decade additional tens of thousands of Jews will probably be displaced from business without being able to gain a foothold in other economic fields in Poland. Other hundreds of thousands will remain in their small stores without earning a livelihood. These masses will seek come escape, for their children if not for themselves. This fact is becoming clear to everyone who looks at the situation and who realizes the process of pauperization and displacement to which the Polish Jews are subjected.

About 1,250,000 Jews engages in handicrafts, factory work and unskilled labor. Although they too suffer from anti-Jewish laws whose aim it is to replace them with Poles, their position is never the less superior to that of the merchants. The process of displacement is more difficult in the trades due to the fact that years must pass before new men can acquire the necessary skill. Petty industry, most of which is in Jewish hands, constitutes an involved economic field. One who engages in it must be able to obtain some capital and then to find a market for his products. The danger to the Jews in this economic field is therefore small, and it is a fact that the number of Jews engaged in petty industrial production has increased. But the number of those seeking a foothold in this field is ten fold the number of those that can be absorbed. Competition increases and assumes pathological forms. The market is flooded with boys and girls who earn about $1.50 a week. The number of Jewish workers has greatly increased during recent years but I doubt whether their total earnings exceed the earnings of the Jewish workers of ten years ago when their number was much smaller. If there were possibilities for the emigration of tens of thousands of workers, then the conditions in this field would improve and it could absorb new workers although it could never satisfy the needs of all the masses of Jews who are being displaced from other economic pursuits. We must bear in mind, however, that in the Polish villages Jewish artisans as well as businessmen are displaced. Poles have learned to sew the clothes of the peasants and the government is encouraging this movement through the establishment of trade schools to train Poles.

The situation in the professions is tragic. Jewish lawyers suffer hunger and many of them leave their professions for common labor after years of struggle. Some Jewish doctors in Lodz charge no more than 40 cents a visit. All hope and prospects in the professions is gone. The number of Jewish students has decreased from 10,000 to 5,000 during the past decade while the number of non-Jewish students has increased by 12,000. Most of the Jewish engineers are unemployed while the Jewish journalists, authors and poets are literally starving. No Polish newspaper will employ a Jew and recently the most widely read Polish newspaper discharged all its Jewish employees. No Jew has an opportunity to engage in scientific work nor may he receive the title of professor in Poland. Those who engage in Jewish research work do not earn enough for their sustenance. All branches of the sciences and arts are closed to the Jews of Poland.

The above cited facts combine into a horrifying picture of the hopeless future facing Polish Jewry. The situation is such while theoretically they still enjoy equal rights. No explicit anti-Jewish laws have been enacted yet and the process of displacement has not yet been organized on a governmental scale. The evil must therefore be recognized before it has attained its final growth. Even the present economic displacement is better than complete economic expulsion which would be tantamount to expulsion from the country.

Thoughts From the Frontier Lestschinsky: The Jews of Central Europe, by Jacob Lestschinsky (Jewish Frontier, June, 1938)

As described in Thoughts from The Frontier: Jacob Lestschinsky, Demographer and Scholar, this essay – “The Jews of Central Europe”, from June of 1938 – is the first of Lestschinsky’s six writings published in the Jewish Frontier from the late 1930s through 1948.

The subsequent five essays are:

The Fate of Six Million – July, 1938
Jews in Baltic Lands – August, 1938
In Fascist Rumania – September, 1938
Terror in Polish Universities – April, 1939
Jewish Expressions in the U.S.S.R. – December, 1948

______________________________

The 1,500,000 Jews who live in these lands now have but one way out of the dilemma:
emigration.
The question is – where?

______________________________

The Jews of Central Europe
June, 1938

EVERY NATION is morally compelled to face the bitter truth. This article is written not with the intent of bewailing our plight but in order to arrive at a factual calculation of the status of six million Jews in Central and Eastern Europe and of the prospects that exist in the lands of immigration.

We will begin the reckoning with those countries in which the Jews had reached the peak of their development and where they now tumble at break-neck speed into a bottomless abyss. Over half a million Jews of central Europe are now in the grip of a ruthless inquisition: 300,000 in Germany and 200,000 in Austria. The liquidation of Jewish commercial concerns in Germany is now proceeding at a more rapid pace than it did even during the most difficult months of 1934 and 1935. At that time the Jewish as well as the world press was full of reports concerning the shameless robberies perpetrated by the “saviors” of the German nation. Now the process of pauperization has become a chronic ailment. Everyone, with practically no exceptions, is preparing for flight. As recently as a year ago German Jewish leaders were seriously considering the establishment of homes for the aged to house 250,000 Jews. According to their calculations about 100,000 of the younger and more adaptable Jews would leave the country in the next five years and only the old and those no longer fit for work would remain. They then believed that the old, the decrepit and the widows would be allowed to end their days in the exile of Hitler land. But not they too have changed their minds. They now realize that the departure of the younger ones increase the terror of the old people at the prospect of remaining in the hell which Germany has become for them and that these too are ready to grasp the wanderer’s staff in order to escape the fate of remaining alone in Germany.

Thus proceeds the liquidation of a section of Jewry which for 150 years has enriched the Jewish people and the whole world with hundreds of scholars and scientists. The 150,000 German Jews who have scattered throughout the world are spiritually crushed and will not soon recover. The 40,000 Jews who have settled in Palestine will probably enrich the Jewish community there, but the 110,000 others who fled to various lands are merely looking for a place of refuge where they can hide without attracting attention. Only one hope fills the heart of the German Jewish refugee who had found a domicile – to find room for those dear to him who still remain in Germany.

Such is the end of German Jewry which was the richest and most prosperous from an economic as well as from a spiritual viewpoint.

(Austria)

But the debacle of German Jewry is as nothing when compared to the calamity which has overtaken the Jews of Austria. The measure of destruction which was achieved in Germany in two years has been accomplished in Austria in two weeks. In proportion to the population there were more Jewish shops pillaged in Austria in two weeks than there were in Germany in two years. More Jewish doctors, dentists, lawyers, engineers and architects were expelled from their positions in Austria in one month than were affected in Germany in three years. The number of Jewish officials in Austria was negligible and altogether they numbered no more than 156 in government and municipal positions.

Austrian Jewry suffered from a severe economic dislocation even before the annexation of the country by Hitler. Sixty thousand out of Vienna’s 170,000 Jews – over one third – were dependent on relief. Among the needy who applied for aid there were Jews who only a few years before themselves contributed considerable sums to the Jewish charitable institutions. Even before Hitler seized Austria the majority of the Jewish lawyers were unemployed and the number of Jewish bank employees decreased from 10,000 to 1,200 over a period of two years; the nationalization of the banks transformed the Jewish employees into paupers and unemployed. A similar fate awaited the Jewish employees of the insurance concerns. The bankruptcy of the insurance company “Phoenix” and its absorption by the government reduced 100 Jewish families to poverty. The plight of the Jewish “intelligentsia” of Vienna even before the advent of Hitler is impossible to describe.

In 1933 tens of thousands of Jews found refuge in the neighboring countries. Even Poland and Russia gave temporary refuge to thousands of German Jewish refugees and even though they soon left these countries they found momentary rest in these lands. Today the situation is different. The gates of all the countries are locked fast. All boundaries are carefully guarded and only a handful succeed in escaping. During the first years of the Nazi regime emigrants were allowed to take along enough money to tide them over for a few months. Today the pockets of those leaving Germany are carefully searched. If one does succeed in escaping, he emerges penniless with not a nickel to pay the porter at the station.

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(Hungary)

Hungary, Austria’s neighbor, harbors 430,000 Jews. Events which transpire in Austria cast their shadows on Hungary. We have heard much of the nightly raids in search of foreign Jews during which hundreds of people, 95% of them are Hungarian citizens, are roused from their beds. Much has also been written of the ceaseless attacks of the anti-Semitic Hungarian students during recent years. But very few people are acquainted with the systematic and thoroughgoing efforts to expel Hungarian Jews from economic positions. The Hungarian parliament is now considering a bill to limit Jewish participation in economic life to 20%. In sponsoring this bill the government aims to steal the thunder of the fascist and anti-Semitic parties and to gain the support of the masses which are sympathetic to fascism. The Hungarian government considers this attitude as “favorable” to the Jews; it is convinced that it “saves” the Jews from the still greater dangers which are threatened by the coming of the fascists into power.

The situation in Hungary is very similar to that in Rumania. The Jews fulfill such an important role in the national economic life that their sudden removal would create an economic catastrophe similar to that which occurred in Rumania during the administration of Goga and Cuza.

It is true that only 35% of the total trade of Hungary is in the hands of Jews but in some branches of commerce that percentage is much higher. Eighty-two perc cent of the wholesale trade in wood and coal is in the hands of the Jews; 73% of the marketing of farm produce is in Jewish hands; 88% of the food produce trade, 71% of the book and stationary stores and 79% of the textile trade is also handled by Jews. They are also prominent in industry and represent 68% of the garment production, 66% of the textile manufacture, 67% of the paper production, 44% of the chemical industry and 37% of the metal industry.

Jews are also heavily represented in the professions and they constitute 54% of the medical calling, 49% in law, 31% of the editors and journalists and 25% of the scientific and literary men.

But the figures cited above apply only to private trade and industry. We get an entirely different picture in the government owned sources of employment. The share of the Jews in government positions amount to no more than 1 1/2 %. Jewish judges and state attorneys make up but 1% of the total; 3% of the professors are Jews and only 16% of the doctors employed in government institutions are Jewish. These figures are taken from the census of 1931. During the past seven years most of the remaining Jews in government employment have been discharged. The figures of Jewish participation in economic life therefore apply only to private enterprise. The Hungarians have not yet mastered trade and industry sufficiently – like the Germans – to be able to ride themselves of the Jews at once. Such a move would endanger the economic structure of the country. Such is the argument of the government when it prepares to liquidate the Jews gradually, over a period of a few years, until the Hungarians are capable of operating the Jewish commercial enterprises as well as of seizing them.

At first glance it may appear that limitation of Jews to 20% is not such a calamity since they comprise only 5% of the total population and even in Budapest, where 200,000 Jews are concentrated, they make up no more than 20% of the inhabitants. It is also a fact that the number of Jews in Hungary is decreasing. Before the war there were 470,000 Jews living in the area of present-day Hungary and today there are only 430,000. The death rate among the Jews is much higher than the birth rate and there is additional loss through emigration. But if we consider the position of Hungarian Jewry from a more realistic point of view we will readily realize the terrible consequences which a limitation to 20% will entail. When the government will begin to apply this economic “plan” it will not consider the fact that Jews occupy only 1% of the positions in transportation, the judiciary and civil service and that their share ought to be increased, if not to twenty at least to five per cent. The new law aims only at taking away but not giving. This is the measure of justice to the Jew, but we must admit that in this age of Hitler even such a law is relatively just.

One thing is clear: Hungarian Jewry is faced with a great catastrophe and it is only due to the more dramatic tragedy of Germany and Austria that we do not hear more about it. I suspect, however, that before long we will be compelled to listen to the anguished cry from Hungary. The political developments in this country are progressing at an accelerating pace. The fascist and anti-Semitic tide is constantly gaining in momentum and the proximity of Nazi Germany is bound to exert a fatal influence on events in Hungary.

Hungarian Jewry which has always avoided contact with the Jews of other countries and which was never represented in world Jewish conclaves may soon gave to ask for aid from world Jewry. Heretofore they were estranged from their people and looked upon themselves as Hungarians of the “Mosaic persuasion,” now they will be compelled to reunite with the living and bleeding body of the Jewish nation.

(Note: Before this article was finished the news arrived that the Hungarian government adopted the limitation bill. Our fears in this respect came true. In practice it means that the Jews will be removed from all non-Jewish and governmental establishments but Jewish concerns will be allowed to employ their co-religionists only to a maximum of 20%.)

Among the Jews of Hungary there are 67,000 laborers and 52,000 officials. These are people without means who face starvation immediately after they are discharged. Out of 2,800 Jewish doctors, only 1,600 will be allowed to practice their profession; of 2,700 lawyers only 1,100 will be permitted to continue their practice of law; only 300 out of the 500 Jewish editors and journalists will be allowed to continue their work. The same holds true for Jewish musicians and actors. Altogether nearly 6,000 Jewish families, which gained their livelihood in the professions, will be left without any income. When we add to these the assistants and office workers that were employed by the professionals we may conclude that about 25,000 Jews will be affected by the new decree. Still more tragic is the fate of those employed in commerce and industry. Nearly half of the 52,000 Jews engaged in these callings will remain without employment and the decree will thus affect between 60 and 70 thousand persons. Somewhat more favorable are the prospects for the Jews in heavy industry where they number not more than 7% but the situation is very critical in the smaller Jewish shops which have Jewish employees only. It will thus be an “optimistic” estimate to say that about 150,000 Hungarian Jews will be affected by the new decree and will be faced with ruin.)

***

(Czechoslovakia)

The fate of the 360,000 Jews living in Czechoslovakia is probably the most tragic of all despite the fact that they live in the midst of a civilized and democratic nation which is fighting the encroachment of Hitlerism and that they enjoy equal rights. Nearly 100,000 Jews live in districts which are overwhelmingly German; 100,000 live in districts with a Hungarian or Slovak majority; another 100,000 live in the midst of a Ukrainian or Hungarian majority and only about 60,000 Jews live in territory inhabited by Czechs. During the past century the Jews of these districts thrice changed their political orientation. At first they were Austro-German patriots and aided the German majority to assimilate the subject peoples. After the Austro-Germans and Hungarians arrived at an understanding and some of the minorities came under the sway of the Hungarians, the Jews became Hungarian patriots. The third change occurred when the Czechs became the dominant element and the Jews became Czech patriots. Even while they lived in districts inhabited by Germans, Ukrainians or Slovaks, the Jews sent their children to the Czech schools. During election periods the Jews allied themselves with the Czechs and aided them to attain majorities which they never could have obtained without the assistance of the Jews. It became axiomatic for the Jews to side with the stronger force. Why? Because the weakest must always depend on the strongest and is forced to lend its small aid. From a historical perspective such a policy is unwise and charged with dangers but it is part of human nature not to look into the future. People want to live and to enjoy life and when the stronger seeks the aid of a weak group in order to dominate other minority groups the weaker one will grasp the extended hand of friendship. The Jews paid dearly for this policy but they continued to ignore the lesson of history.

A great danger threatens Czechoslovakia. The exodus has already begun. At this moment the immigrants of recent date who settled in the country are leaving it; but every letter that comes out of Czechoslovakia voices a great terror of what is about to come. If Hitler’s plan to partition Czechoslovakia, which was formulated in the Voelkischer Beobachter, is carried out, then the Jews will find themselves in a position much worse than that of the Jews in Germany. The Germans, Slovaks, Poles and Hungarians that will be detached from Czechoslovakia will take revenge upon the Jews for having supported the Czechs. Even if Czechoslovakia is to remain an undivided state it is evident that all its national minorities will obtain a wide measure of autonomy and the Jews will fall under their sway. Sooner or later the Jews will thus be faced with persecution and economic annihilation at the hands of the national minorities.

The terror which has seized Czechoslovakian Jewry – until recently the happiest Jewish community in central Europe – shows that they instinctively sense the approaching calamity. The democratic “paradise” island in the heart of Europe is about to vanish and with its disappearance the last ray of light for the Jews of central Europe will be extinguished.

This is the condition of the Jews in the central European countries. It is a situation which offers no hopes or favorable prospects for the near future. The 1,500,000 Jews who live in these lands now have but one way out of the dilemma: emigration. The question is – where?

Thoughts from The Frontier: Jacob Lestschinsky, Demographer and Scholar

Reading – whether fiction or non-fiction – is a journey to places real or imagined. Some literary destinations are both, particularly those in the genre of alternate history. In the overlapping realms of science fiction, and, speculative fiction, this is exemplified by Philip K. Dick’s The Man in The High Castle (see also…) and Cyril M. Kornbluth’s 1957 novella Two Dooms (…also see). Both tales, set in a post-1945 America, occur in a world where the Third Reich and Imperial Japan have defeated the Allies, and, the United States is geographically divided into zones of occupation controlled by the two victorious Axis powers.

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Photograph of Philip K. Dick by Nicole Panter, in Alexander Star’s article “The God in the Trash: A Review of the Works of Philip K. Dick“, in The New Republic, December 6, 1993

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The foundation of these two works, and the myriad of other tales in this genre – regardless of geographic or temporal setting – is that either a single and distinct event, or, the unanticipated confluence of a series of ostensibly unrelated events, has eventuated in history flowing along a river of time different – dramatically or subtly; humorously or horrifically – from that of the world we know.

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Cyril M. Kornbluth, 1939 (Photo by Robert A. Madle, from cover of His Share of Glory – The Complete Short Science Fiction of C. M. Kornbluth (1997), Edited by Timothy P. Szczesuil)

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This world.

The world in which you’re reading this blog post, at this point in time.

(Right here.)

(Right now.)

Given the staggering impact of the Second World War – whether ideologically, demographically, technologically, or bureaucratically; an impact that is continuing today, in 2023 – it’s not surprising that that near-eight-decade-old conflict would be the setting for writers as skilled and perceptive as Dick and Kornbluth, however different they were in life experience, world-view, and literary style.

However, what about the First World War as a springboard for a tale of alternate history?

An example published in the year 2000 is Martin J. Girdon’s The Severed Wing. In his novel, Mr. Gidron has imagined a world where the First World War ended with an outcome stunningly different than that of “our” world”: The Russian monarchy was never overthrown; Imperial Russia was never transformed into the Soviet Union; Communism never wreaked horror across the world; there was never a Shoah. And with all, there was never a Second World War. (Mr. Gidron discusses such details in detail in his closing “Author’s Note,” paralleling Leo Tolstoy’s afterword to War and Peace.) And yet, while the world created by Mr. Gidron is dramatically unlike ours, it is still a world most human: a world of military alliances, geopolitical conflict, and unrelenting social and economic uncertainty, as exemplified in the life and fate of its protagonists, Janusz and Irena.

While I won’t present any “spoilers” in this post, suffice to say that the novel is very well-written and the plot smartly and well-conceived. A particularly eerie aspect of Gidron’s novel is the way in which, through a succession of events of steadily and (as we know…) irrevocably greater impact, the world of The Severed Wing is supplanted with and completely replaced by our world. The novel’s notable difference from The Man in The High Castle and Two Dooms is the near-absence of a science-fiction ambience, though one could justifiably include the book in that literary genre. In this, I think it’s close in tone to Ward Moor’s brilliantly executed Bring the Jubilee – (ohhh, has that novel long-deserved a feature film or mini-series!!!) about a world in which the Confederacy won the Civil War, in indirectly posing questions about the nature of free will, destiny, and fate.

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Portrait of Ward Moore, from his FindAGrave biographical profile, by contributor RPD2

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Otherwise, by nature and intention, Jewish history and Jewish destiny (I suppose the destiny of the Jews will be revealed in time, but “that” time will never be our time) are entirely and intentionally central to The Severed Wing, unlike Dick’s or Kornbluth’s works.

In all this, I cannot say that I “l i k e d” the conclusion of The Severed Wing – I did not – but I did appreciate it. (Well, if I restricted my reading to books about bouncing bunny rabbits with winsome eyes, I wouldn’t be reading much of anything!)

So, here are the novel’s front and read covers. (For your consideration.)

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I read The Severed Wing in the early 2000s.

About a decade and a half later, amidst reviewing, examining, and otherwise-looking-at issues of the Jewish Frontier at the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public library, I discovered works of a vastly different sort of writer, written in an altogether different sort of context, that – by virtue of their timing – immediately; eerily reminded me of Gidron’s novel. The context? The journal Jewish Frontier (on 35mm microfilm, remember that?!). The writer? Jacob Lestschinsky.

As described in his biographical profile at YIVO and Wikipedia, Lestschinsky (8/26/76-3/22/66) was a historian and sociologist specializing in Jewish demography and economic history. He lived in Ukraine, Switzerland, Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, and Poland once more, before – was it prescience, luck, or something else? – moving to the united States in 1938, where he lived until going on aliyah in 1959. As an academic and journalist who lived during an era and in a world of enormous and perhaps inescapable political and social turbulence, Lestschinsky had a complex professional life, which included working for ORT (The Society for Handicraft and Agricultural Work among the Jews of Russia (Obshchestvo Remeslennago i Zemledelecheskago Truda Sredi Evreev v Rossii), helping to organize the Fareynikte Yidishe Sotsialistishe Arbeter Partey (United Jewish Socialist Party), working as a correspondent for the Forverts, being a founding member of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, editing Bleter far yidisher demografye, statistik, un ekonomik in the mid-1920s, and throughout his career, writing for Jewish newspapers and periodicals.

In terms of Lestschinsky’s scholarship, Gennadiy Estraikh, in Science in Context (2007) notes the former as having been the author of over 35 academic papers, while a search of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s database yields 53 “hits” listing Lestschinky’s name in news items published between 1926 and 1966. At the Center for Jewish History, his “Correspondence with individuals and institutions” comprises about 1,800 letters.

I’ve had no success in finding his photographic portrait, but his biography at YIVO includes three images in which he appears with other intellectuals, writers, and YIVO members. I’ve taken the liberty of editing (“Photoshop-Elementing”, that is) these images, which are shown below, accompanied by YIVO’s captions:

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“Jakob Lestschinsky (second from right), historian Simon Dubnow (center), Meyer Abraham Halevy from Bucharest (left), and other delegates to the YIVO Conference pose at the grave of Tsemaḥ Szabad, a physician, leader of the Folkist party, and founder of YIVO, Vilna, 1935.”

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“A gathering of Jewish intellectuals in Kulautuva, Lithuania, 1920 or 1921. Those identified in the photograph include journalist Reuven Tsarfat (2, in fedora); Bal-Makhshoves (4, wearing white boater); Dovid Bergelson (6, on ground with his head on his neighbor’s knee), his wife (10, seated, second from left), and son (5, small child to Bergelson’s left); Zelig Kalmanovitch (7, with striped tie, center); Jakob Lestschinsky (8, to Kalmanovitch’s right); and Nokhem Shtif (9, to the left of Bergelson’s wife).”

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“Shmuel Niger (second from right, hand-numbered “3”), his brother, the writer Daniel Tsharni (second from left, “2”), scholar Jakob Lestschinsky (left, “1”), and others, on a trip to the Alps, ca. 1920s. Photograph by M. Aschwarden.”

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Lestschinsky’s writings in the Jewish Frontier, all penned while he resided in the United States, pertain to the same topics as his scholarly work: They profile life in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe in vocational / professional, economic, and demographic terms, effectively capturing a late 1930s sociological snapshot of the world Eastern European Jewry … only one year before the commencement of the Second World War. Though entirely substantive, direct, and grimly unflinching in content, and characterized by statistics and quantitative information, the quality of Lestschinsky’s writing is excellent, and comports well with the serious but not-necessarily-too-academic tone of the Jewish Frontier.

Four of these items were published as a series from June through September of 1938, each installment pertaining to a different Eastern European region or country. These titles comprise:

The Jews of Central Europe – June, 1938
The Fate of Six Million – July, 1938
Jews in Baltic Lands – August, 1938
In Fascist Rumania – September, 1938

A fifth item, published five months before the war’s September beginning, specifically describes conditions experienced (well, a more apt word would be endured) by Jewish students in Polish academic institutions. The appropriate title:

Terror in Polish Universities – April, 1939

Lestschinsky’s sixth and last item in the Jewish Frontier pertains to the Jews of the Soviet Union, but – the Second World War having ended three years previously – covers Jewish life in the Soviet Union during the early years of the (first?!) Cold War. Paralleling the refreshing, anti-Communist, anti-leftist ethos of the Jewish Frontier from the mid-1930s through the early 1950s, Lestschinsky, too, has a deeply skeptical and worried (in retrospect, more than validly so) view of the future of Jewish life in the Soviet Union. The title:

Jewish Expressions in the U.S.S.R. – December, 1948

And so, my next bunch of posts will be comprised of Lestschinsky’s Jewish Frontier articles, one article per post, verbatim.

The one conclusion that can be drawn from the articles, especially those from 1938, is that even if the river of time had traversed an altogether different and infinitely more benign course, Eastern European Jewry – in a collective sense; as it existed under conditions prevailing in the 1930s – would have intentionally and steadily reduced to an abject, irrecoverable level of penury and social degradation. Lestschinsky proposed no explicit answers to this awful predicament, but he didn’t need to: The very publication of his articles in a publication unapologetically devoted to Zionism was his answer.

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In the meantime, here are some sort-of-randomly chosen news articles about, or mentioning, Jacob Lestschinsky, several found via FultonHistory. They’re chronologically arranged, and illustrate how his scholarship appeared in both the general and Jewish news media, as opposed to specialized, professional, and academic venues.

The central and haunting take-away in terms of raw numbers is how relatively little total Jewish numbers have changed across a century’s span.

Then again, what will historians of the future (if there are historians in the future) write of the world of 2023; the world as a whole; the Jewish world?

I won’t broach that question.

Oh. Seems I just did.

Whether for good, ill, or neither, perhaps it is best that the future remains unknown to man.

Some articles…

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Estimates 14,830,832 Jews in World

The New York Times
August 7, 1925

BERLIN, Aug. 4 (Jewish Telegraphic Agency). – The dispute concerning the total number of Jews in the world has become more complicated by the publication here of new figures gathered by Jacob Lestschinsky, who says that the total is 14,830,832. According to the American Jewish Yearbook the total is 13,000,000, while Trietsch’s estimate is 17,000,000. Besides these figures there are others less authoritative compiled in America and elsewhere.

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Jewish Population Is Put at 16,000,000
World Total is Five Times That
of a Century Ago German
Authority States

The Evening Leader (Corning, N.Y.)
November 1, 1932

During the last hundred years the world’s Jewish population has grown from 3,000,000 to 16,000,000, having quintupled in numbers from 1825 to 1925, whereas Europe, America, South Africa and Australia increased their population only three and a half times, according to figures published in the current number of the Menorah Journal by Jakob Lestschinsky of Berlin, an authority on Jewish demography.

“Never before,” Mr. Lestschinsky writes, says the New York Times, “were the Jews so numerous, nor to such a great extent gathered together in Metropolitan centres. Almost a third of the Jewish people now live in the fourteen largest cities of the civilized world.

“Quintupling in numbers from 1825 to 1925, the Jewish people propagated at over one and one half times the rate of Europe’s population as a whole. In no other period of their history have the Jews shown a similar growth. Moreover, this phenomenal increase was achieved not through Increased birth rate but through extraordinarily reduced death rata.

Rate of Increase High

“In the 55 years from 1825 to 1880 the Jewish numbers grew from 3,280,000 to 7,660,000; and in the halt century from 1880 to 1930 their numbers grow again to 15,800,000. In each of these periods they mora than doubled.

“This unprecedented increase seems all the mora remarkable when we recall that during the last half century the East European Jews were engulfed by three large pogrom-waves (1881-82, 1903-5 and 1918-21), with 2,000 massacres in which approximately 100,000 Jews were murdered and from 200,000 to 300,000 prematurely died of epidemics.”

What may properly be called “World-Jewry,” the writer says, arose only during the last century. Out of a small people, the greater majority living in Southeastern Europe, Asia Minor and North Africa, and strewn about in innumerable villages and small towns, forming tiny, unimportant islands in vast Gentile seas, the Jews have expanded over the entire world, settling in the industrially most advanced countries and concentrating in the largest cities.

“The geographical map of Jewry of a hundred years back,” he writes, “shows plainly that the Jews warn at that time crowded together in the most backward countries: In the Russian part of Europe, in Poland and Galicia, in the Balkans, in North Africa and Asia Minor.

Migrations to the West

“In the course of the century huge Jewish migrations took place from East to West; from the agrarian to the Industrial countries, from political despotisms to democratic nations, from the spheres of Slavic-Arabian culture to those of English-German culture.

“Perhaps the most striking change has come about in America, which now contains about a third of world Jewry, whereas a hundred years ago it contained only one-third of 1 per cent – no less than a hundredfold multiplication.”

In the fourteen largest cultural centres in Europe and America, of more than 1,000,000 inhabitants each, there are now 4,500,000 Jews – almost 20 per cent of the entire Jewish people. New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston and Cleveland have 2,750,000 Jews, or more than 80 per cent of the entire Jewish population in the United States.

More than 6,000,000 of the world Jewry, or 38.6 per cent, are engaged in trade, contracting and banking. The next largest group, 5,750,000, of 36.4 per cent, is engaged in Industry and handicraft. A million, or 6.3 per cent, are professional men and public officers: 625,000 are engaged in agriculture, 325,000 are houseworkers and diverse hirelings, while 2,000,000 are without vocations.

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30 PCT. OF JEWS LIVE IN AMERICAS

Nearly Two-Thirds Are in Europe, New Survey Discloses.

The Evening Star (Washington, D.C.)
April 10, 1936

WARSAW, April 10 (Jewish Telegraphic Agency). – A total world Jewish population of 16,240,000 of whom 5,000,000, or 30 per cent, live in the Americas it has been reported by the Jewish Scientific Institute in a statistical survey published in the publication, Yivo Bletter.

The survey, conducted by Jacob Lestschinsky, economist and writer, as of the beginning of 1936, shows the world Jewish population increased 1,300,000 in the last 10 years.

The distribution of the Jews has remained stationary. More than 60 per cent of them, about 10,000,000, live in Europe, 5,000,000 In the Americas, more than 5 per cent, or 500,000, in Asia, and the rest, about 30,000, in Australia.

More than 10,000,000 Jews, or two-thirds, live in three countries. The United States has 4,450,000, Poland has 3,150,000 and Soviet Russia 3,080,000.

The Jews are scattered over 30 countries, of. which only four – the above three and Rumania – have more than 1,000,000. Seventeen countries have more than 100,000 Jews. The number of Jews shows an increase in every country except Germany, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Italy and Turkey.

Digital Newspaper Archives of US & Canada

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Jewish Population

The Southern Jewish Weekly
June 6, 1952

The figures indicating the Jewish population in various sections of the world, released last week by the World Jewish Congress, are substantially similar to those made available earlier in the year in the American Jewish Year Book for 5712, published jointly by the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Publication Society.

The present study, made by Dr. Jacob Lestschinsky, statistician and demographer, shows that “wars and anti-Jewish terror in Europe, the birth of Israel and other factors led to the migration of more than 4,000,000 Jews since the turn of the century, thus changing the entire Jewish demographic picture.”

Coming closer home, the United States is given a Jewish population of five million; Argentina, 400,000; Canada, 200,000; Brazil, 120,000; with the Jewish population in other eighteen Latin-American countries estimated at 150,000.

Of especial significance, Dr. Lestschinsky points out is the “remarkably swift growth of the Jewish community in the Holy Land, where the Jewish population has increased forty-fold in the last fifty years, rising from 35,000 in 1900 to 1,400,000 at the end of 1951.” One shudders to contemplate what might have happened to a preponderant majority of these 1,400,000 men, women and children had Israel not been eager, even though not prepared, to receive them. This may not come within the purview of the statistician; it must not be overlooked by those who read his figures.

In Europe, that is, with the exception of the Jewish groups behind the Iron Curtain, there are only two major Jewish communities – Britain with a Jewish population of 400,000, and France with a Jewish population of 240,000.

All of which furnishes an interesting picture of world Jewry today.

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This April, 1966 issue of The National Jewish Post and Opinion (of Indiana) is interesting on two counts.

First, it mentions Jacob Lestschinsky’s passing in Jerusalem.

Second, it carries an obituary for and tribute to a man whose life took a far different path: Israel Jacobson of Rochester, New York, who at the young age of forty-four (young even in 1966) passed away only a week before Lestschinsky. Though Jewish affairs in upstate New York would ostensibly have little relevance to Jewish life in Indiana, it turns out that Israel Jacobson, as T/Sgt. Israel Jacobson (12017570), heavily decorated for military service as an infantryman in the North African campaign, was the subject of several articles in Rochester and Buffalo newspapers in mid-1965. These related his belated receipt of military awards, and (perhaps because he’d been a boxer before entering the military) his struggle with cancer.

A member of E Company, 18th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, Israel Jacobson was the son of Rabbi Harry Jacobson, of 60 Baden Street, in Rochester. Born in Poland on November 2, 1921, he passed away on March 20, 1966, and is buried at Britton Road Cemetery, in Rochester. His name appears on page 351 of American Jews in WW II, which records that he received the Silver Star with one Oak Leaf Cluster, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart (he was wounded in mid-February of 1943) with one Oak Leaf Cluster. His wartime story was noted in The American Hebrew (6/11/43), Chicago Jewish Chronicle (5/28/43), and Rochester Times Union (3/26/43, 8/24/43, 7/11/45), while postwar, news articles about him appeared in the Buffalo Courier-Express, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, and Jamestown Post-Journal.

Jacob Lestschinsky

National Jewish Post and Opinion
April 1, 1966

JERUSALEM – Jacob Lestschinsky, dean of Jewish sociologists, died at the age of 89 last week following long illness.

A native of Russia, Lestschinsky was one of the founders of the Zionist Socialist Party and was a delegate to the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903.

Later he devoted himself to Jewish sociology, publishing dozens of books and studies and countless articles in Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, German and English.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution he moved to Poland, then to Germany, finally to the U.S. In 1959 he settled in Israel – first in Tel Aviv and later in Jerusalem.

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RABBI’S SON ENTERS PRO PRIZE RING

The Wave (Rockaway Beach), July 11, 1946

After five years in uniform, ex-Army tech sergeant Israel Jacobson, the fighting son of a Rochester, N.Y., rabbi, has laid aside his carbine, and henceforth will restrict his fighting qualities to the professional prize ring as a Long Island’s bid for featherweight honors among the paid to punch brigade.

Twice overseas and twice wounded, “Battling Jacobson” as he has been dubbed by Long Island fight fans, participated in five major campaigns and two invasions. He holds several Army awards including the Croix de Guerre, Silver Star Medal, Bronze Star Medal, New York State Conspicuous Service Cross, and the Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster.

Wisely enough, Jacobson, now a resident of Queens, has placed his fistic destiny in the hands of Irwin Goldie, internationally known fight manager and former G.I. who managed Billy Conn’s overseas tour and promoted service boxing tournaments in London, Paris and Rome.

Sgt. Jacobson’s story travelled from Rochester to Long Island. Here’s an article from The Wave (Rockaway Beach) from July 11, 1946:

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MEMORIAL SERVICES FOR LESTCHlNSKY HELD IN NEW YORK; DIED IN ISRAEL

Jewish Telegraphic Agency
April 27, 1966

NEW YORK, April 26. (JTA) — Memorial services for the late Jacob Lestchinsky, Jewish sociologist and author, who died a month ago in Israel were held here today by the American section of the World Jewish Congress and YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research. Dr Maurice L. Perlzweig, director of the WJC department of international affairs, who presided at the services, noted that Dr. Lestchinsky was a founder of the Congress movement, and was known for many detailed studies and reports on the Jewish position in many parts of the world. Other speakers were Prof. Salo Baron, Jewish historian, and C. Bezalel Sherman, chairman of the administrative committee of the WJC American section. Mr. Lestchinsky died at 89, in Israel.

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For Your Further Enlightenment and Distraction…

Jacob Lestschinsky, at…

… Wikipedia

… he.Wikipedia

… The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe

… Jewish Virtual Library

… National Library of Israel (Catalog records of books, archives, articles, and miscellaneous items)

… Center for Jewish History (Jacob Lestschinsky’s Correspondence with individuals and institutions, comprising about 1,800 letters)

World Jewish Population by Country, at…

… Wikipedia

Estraikh, Gennadiy, Jacob Lestschinsky: A Yiddishist Dreamer and Social Scientist, Science in Context, V 20, N 2, 2007, pp. 215-237. (Bibliography lists over 35 works by Lestschinsky)