THE JEWISH NEWS

Page Two

Friday, January

14, 1944

BUY WAR BONDS

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SIMONS-MICHELSON CO.

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Strictly
Confidential

By PHINEAS J. BIRON

(Copyright. 1944, by Seven Arts
Feature Syndicate)

SUGGESTION
May we respectfully suggest to Capt.
Maur i c e Evans of the U. S. Army
that he give up the idea of presenting
"The Merchant of Venice" in Army
camps? We greatly admire Captain Ev-
ans as a Shakespearean actor, but there
are plenty of other plays by the Bard
that he could present most effectively,
and we do feel that this is no time to
bring Shylock back to life . • . Why
doesn't he present J. B. Priestley's new
play, "Desert Highway?" . . . It was
written for and about the army, and
tries to answer the question "What Am
I Fighting For?" . . One of the six
characters is a Jew, and the whole play
is a flaming appeal for unity . The
play is a smash hit in England, where
it is touring all the camps.
* * *
FROM FOREIGN PARTS
A representative of the late Sikorsky
Government-in-Exile discussed Polish-
Soviet relations in Moscow shortly before
the diplomatic rupture . . . The Polish
diplomat is reported to have said to
Stalin: "We don't mind if Polish Jewish
refugees are made Soviet citizens, as long
as you promise not to send them back to
Poland after the war" • . . To which
Stalin is said to have answered: "I con-
sider them good material or citizenship
even if you don't, and shall be glad to
have them."
Montreal Jewry recently commemorat-
ed the hundredth anniversary of •the death
of Ezekiel Hart of Three Rivers, Can-
ada . . . It is worth remembering, in these
days of increasing anti-Semitism, that
Hart was twice elected to the Provincial
Government by an exclusively French-
Canadian constituency . . . This was in
1807, and again in 1808 . . Progress in
interreligious good will in Canada is ap-
parently not on the march . . . A hund-
red years ago the French-Canadians of
Three Rivers were more. civilized than
-•• -
today.

WAR NOVELETTE
This is a true story . . . In a Royal
Canadian Air Force trainin$ camp a
Jewish boy knocked down an officer be-
cause the latter had referred insultingly
to his Jewishness . . The boy, a strap-
ping six-footer who comes from a very
solid and well-known Montreal family,
was brought up on charges, and was
sentenced to six days' arrest . . . He re-
fused to accept the decision and asked
for a court martial, on the grounds that
he had enlisted to fight Fascism and
felt that he had to fight it wherever he
encountered it, even in his own country
... He was warned that a court martial
might expel him from the school and
even sentence him to a long prison term
. . . Yet he insisted . . All the same,
however, the court martial was indefin-
itely postponed . . P. S.: The boy grad-
uated with honors, highest on the list,
and was -the only student in his class to
receive a commission . . . He now pilots
planes between Canada and England,
and is highly respected by his non-
Jewish comrades, who often tell him:
"We respect anybody who fights for his
religion, whether Jew, Protestant or
Catholic."

* * *

ABOUT PEOPLE
Lewis Browne, whose expose of Fas;
cism, "See What I Mean?", is a best--
seller, still likes to recall the days when,
as a rabbi at Waterbury, Conn., he was
asked to leave the pulpit because he • had
sponsored a meeting at which the late
Carlo Tresca, famed Italian anti-Fascist,
was the main speaker . . . Browne hasn't
had a pulpit since that day two decades
ago, but he still retains and on occasion
uses the rabbinical privilege of perform-
ing marriage ceremonies.
Pvt. Leonard Fierst, who was wounded
at Guadalcanal but refused the Purple
Heart award because he was afraid the
news would worry his mother, is the son
of Harry P. Fierst, for years treasurer
of the Zionist Organization of America.

Quotation of the Week

Would that the Palestine administration in those early days had
acted in good faith, in the spirit of Balfour and the British government
of which he was a member, and the Jews had been told frankly and
generously: here you are! This is your national home! The doors of
Palestine are open! Take the available land, the vast areas of the
former Turkish crown lands, on which not a soul has been living these
hundreds of years and which have turned into wilderness by neglect.
Take that land and cultivate it! Make it productive! Plow up the weeds
and cacti! Lay out your orchards and wheat fields and orange groves!
Make them yield a hundredfold by modern methods of agriculture!
Build your cities on it: a new Jerusalem, a new Hebron, and a new
Jericho. Erect your schools! Let your children play in the new parks
and forests of eucalypti. Tell the Jews of Poland and Russia and Ru-
mania to leave their stinking ghettoes at last and come over to breathe
the free air of their own land. Tell them that their prayers have been
answered! Tell them that their ancient longing will be stilled, because
England wills it so. Let there come as many as the land will hold until
Eretz Israel is filled again as of old, from Dan to Bersheeba, with the
children of Israel. Let the weary and persecuted forget the memory
of the evil years and the centuries spent in the blood-bespattered Dis-
persion. Let them be at home in their own national home! Here a new
world and a new life is open to them! Only see to it that no ill befalls
these starvelings of Arabs, the fellahin peasants, who are now the
slaves of their landlords and moneylenders! Let them share your
new freedom!
If the Palestine administration had spoken that way, in that spirit,
the spirit of the Balfour Declaration, as it should have spoken and as
the civilized world expected it to speak, I make bold to believe that we
would never have heard of riots in Palestine, of bloodshed and terror,
and of those silly, pompous, fact-finding commissions which did not
want to find facts leading to the truth, but which merely covered up
with whitewash the men in the Palestine administration primarily
responsible, consciously and willfully, of all the misery and pain and
heartbreak that have accompanied and gone into the building of the
Jewish national home in Palestine these past 25 years.
—PIERRE VAN PAASSEN

in "The Forgotten Ally."

Heard in
The Lobbies

By ARNOLD LEVIN

(Copyright, 1944, Independent Jewish
Press Service, Inc.)

FORGOTTEN MAN

Strange. that in all the writing and
editorializing being done in connection
with the apathy of the New York police
to the recent anti-Semitic outbreaks, no
mention is made of the tremendous in-
fluence of a certain clergyman on the
New York City patrolmen. His Brooklyn
church is often attended by them, and
his opinions uttered in sermons and in
columns in a hate-sheet, are law to them.

People of his own faith are none too
happy about him. He has often been
paired with Father Coughlin. Claims
are made that his influence is felt in
other places besides the Police Depart-
ment, and extends beyond New York
City. He has often been to Boston, too.
It is rumored that aside from his several
full-time hates (Jews, the Roosevelt ad-
ministration, etc.), he also has part-time
hates, which include magazines whose
cartoons he deems "indecent." He is
happy to see their p o s t al privileges
stopped, while he wants to see Social
Justice's postal privileges resumed. We
are afraid that our colleagues of the
'Working press missed a cue there. It is
.a good story and not too late . . . Walter
Winchell's recent remarks are very pro-
vocative. He writes "Some New York
cops are refusing overtime patrol work
because it interferes with (ahem!)
`other activities.' " Has Walter the Drew
case in mind? You know, Patrolman
Drew, friend of Joe McWilliams.
* * *
QUEEN MOTHER ASKS FAVOR

Between
You and Me

By BORIS SMOLAR

(Copyright, 1944, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Inc.)

MARCH OF TIME

The State Department has resumed
accepting applications for visas for
people residing in Soviet Russia . . .
And the Department of Justice now
omits. from its questionnaire . on immi-
gration all questions aimed at . establish-
ing whether the applicant believes in
communism.

Did you hear of the project broached
in high circles in Washington, to bring
over to the United States about a million
Italians from liberated Italy? This pro-
ject is being advanced at a time when
members of Congress are told that Amer-
ica cannot at present save Jews in Europe
. . Its sponsors are trying to sell the
idea that the Italian immigrants, when
admitted, will remain here "temporar-
ily" to fill the . jobs for which we now
have insufficient people . . . This, some
claim, will save the American govern-
ment the work of feeding a million
people in liberated Italy, and will at the
same time relieve our man-power short-
age . . . Don't we import thousands of
Mexicans as rail laborers,. some argue
in support of the project . . . And what
about the many thousands of manual
laborers we import from Mexico for
farm work? . . . Well, the same questions
could be asked with regard to admitting
more Jews from Europe . . Especially
since the immigration quotas of the
countries from where these Jews would
come have not been filled for a number
of years . . Wouldn't it be just as
humane to admit Jews from Europe
"temporarily" on the same basis as sug-
gested for the admission of a million
Italians?
* * *

The Queen Mother of England invited
Irving Berlin to her box, and—Much to
his surprise—asked the former East Side PALESTINE AFFAIRS
The American Jewish Committee, true
minstrel to do her a favor. "Sure, sure,"
he gulped, and thought: "Up to half of to its pledge to combat the British White
my kingdom." She asked that he auto- Paper, has sent a delegation to SeCretary
graph several programs for her, which of State Cordell Hull asking him to use
Irving did but found suddenly to his his influence with the British govern-
embarrassment that the first three pens ment to secure revocation of the docu-
he tried were either dry or leaking. He ment which closes Palestine to Jewish
was more nervous than at an • opening. immigration .. The American Jewish

Purely
Commentary

By PHILIP SLOMOVITZ

PALESTINE'S FIRST HEBREW BIBLE
An interesting explanation comes to
Your Commentator from the Hebrew
University Press in Jerusalem regarding
the phenomenon of the forthcoming ap-
pearance of the first Hebrew Bible • in
Eretz Israel.
On Aug. 6, 1943, this column discussed
at length the question of Bible-publishing
in Palestine. We pointed out then that
we had in our possession a pocket edition
of the Bible, published in 5699 by "Is-
rael Publishing Co. of Tel Aviv."
It must have taken nearly four months
for this issue of The Jewish News to
reach Palestine. This week, by Air Mail,
a letter under date of Nov. 25, 1943, came
to us from the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem explaining the "pocket edition
Bible" we referred to.

* * *

THE FIRST BIBLE—YET TO APPEAR
A. Ibn-Sahav, manager of the Hebrew
University Press, author of this letter,.
explains why Dr. Judah L. Magnes has i
made no reference to the "Israel Pub-
lishing Co. of Tel Aviv" Bible in our
possession when he announced that the
first Bible in Hebrew was to be publish-
ed in Palestine by a committee chosen
by the Hebrew University. Writes Mr.
Ibn-Sahav:

"Permit me to draw your attention
to the fact that that edition was a
photographic reproduction of British
and Foreign Bible _Society edition.
The only thing which the publisher
added to this is the title page bearing
the inscription: "Meduyok Hetev al
pi Hamsoro". ("exactly in accordance
with the Tradition"). Text and form
are in accordance with the Ma.ssorah
to the same extent as the Missionary
Bible.
"A similar photographic edition
was published recently by the Yavne
Publishing Firm in Tel Aviv.
"When Dr. Magnes announced the
first Jewish edition of a one volume
Hebrew Bible in ..Palestine, he of
course had in mind a Bible which
would be set up and printed in Pal-
estine and by Jews, and it seems to
us that he was fully entitled not to
mention those editions for which the
editors used photographs of foreign
editions."

Thus, what was believed to have been
a puzzle—that a Bible purported to haVe
been printed in Palestine should be in
circulation, belying the claim that the
first Hebrew Bible is yet to appear in the
Jewish homeland—is solved. It is not:
a puzzle at all, now that the facts are,
made known by Dr.. Magnes' representa-.
tive.

Overcoming
Anti-Semitism

The subject of anti-Semitism is treat-
ed from "the point of view of what Jews
and others concerned with the health of
democracy can do to check this infec-
tion" by Rabbi Solomon A. Feinberg, in
"Overcdming Anti-Sernitism," .published
by Harper and Bros., New York.
Handling the subject as a conflict be-
tween Jew-baiting and democracy, Rabbi
Fineberg suggests interesting methods of
approaching the issue. His approach is
that the future of the Jew depends on the
freedom of the world and that non-Jews
must join in the fight against this evil
for the sake of the protection of human
rights.
Thus, the evil is exposed as anti-Ameri-
can, and systematic educational efforts
are propagated in this interesting volume.

Committee is also making an effort to
meet Lord Halifax, British Ambassador
in Washington, for the purpose of tell-
ing him that all Jews in the United
States are unanimoi.wly opposed to the

White Paper.

