Page Twenty-four

THE JEWISH NEWS

Friday, April 5, 1946

Julian H. Krolik

Rare Type of Unselfish Community Leader

By PHILIP R. MARCUSE

is always going somewhere in a
hurry—in Julian's case, it would
be to a Board meeting.

At the present time, Julian
Krolik is on the Boards of Direc-
tors of the Detroit Community
Fund, North End Clinic, Jewish
Hospital Association and United
Jewish Charities. He is treasurer
of the Jewish Community Coun-
cil, president of the East Central
States Region of the Council of
Jewish Federations and Welfare
Funds, and a member of the ad-
visory committee of The Detroit
Jewish News. He was president
of North End Clinic for four
years, and has engaged in com-
munity welfare work fOr 40
years. He is a member of the ad-
visory board of the Detroit
League for the Handicapped. In-
cidentally, he is vice president of
the Krolik Corporation, and a
director of the Industrial • Na-
tional Bank.

W

HEN YOU SEE THE
slightly stooped-shouldered, slightly bald gentle-
man who is known as Julian Krolik walk serenely
along in the most frigid weather without benefit
of overcoat or hat, don't pity him. Julian, the
newly-elected president of the Jewish Welfare
Federation, is a fresh air fiend. And he is a fiend
for community betterment too, as we shall see.

You couldn't say exactly that he walks serenely
along, either. It is more like a step impelled by
steel springs—a gait that a man would affect who

H

It is partly parental influence, for his father,
Henry A. Krolik, who settled in the United
States in 1852, and in Detroit in 1871, was
on the Board of Temple Beth El and his
mother (Ida G. Brown) worked actively in
the Jewish Widows' Aid Society, was one of the
organizers of the Jewish Women's Club which
preceded the National Council of Jewish Women

They Are The Future

Children are the most precious possession of a
people. They are the greatest wealth of the. present.
They are the future.
During the past 12 years, nine out -of every 10
Jewish children in Europe perished. Only 150,000
are alive - today. Half of them have lost their mother
or their father or both. Weak from years of malnu-
trition, they are not getting enough to eat now. They
have no homes. They are in rags.
They are the future of the Jewish people of Eu-
rope. Without help from America, they cannot sur-
vive. Without the food and clothing and medicine
and care that we can send, they will not live.
Through the $100,000,000 United Jewish Appeal—
and the $2,000,000 Emergency Allied Jewish Cam-
paign which is Detroit's part of the great national
effort—we can furnish the funds that will enable
the Joint Distribution Committee, the United Pales-
tine Appeal and the National Refugee Service to save
the Jewish children of Europe.
Recently two Amelican. women, Mrs. Eleanor
Roosevelt and Mrs. David M. Levy, national chair-
man of the Women's Division of the UJA, visited
Europe. Their observations are important.
When Mrs. Roosevelt came back from seeing the
camps in which Jews were living in Germany this
is what she said:
"The camp I am talking about was one of the very
best. The people were living in houses that had been
taken over from the German community. The kitch-
ens were in special barracks. The displaced persons
were fed 2,300 calories a day as against 1,500 which
the German people are allowed. But 2,300 calories
a day gives you, I think, about the most uninterest-
ing food you can imagine and never really lets you
be without hunger.
"The thing which does vary their food a little bit
in some places are surplus Red Cross packages whiCh
have apparently been allowed to seep in from the
Prisoner of War canes which are closing down.
"They have three meals a day in the displaced
persons camps. For the main meal, they get soup,
the basis of which is potatoes; now and then they
have some other vegetables; rarely do they have a
piece of meat; and again, a hunk of dark bread.
"For supper, they have tea or Coffee—it is pretty
bad coffee—and now and then the children are
allowed some dried milk, particularly if they are
not well.
"On the day I was in the Jewish camp, the main
meal was powdered eggs—scrambled eggs. The peo-
ple in these camps have such a longing to create a
sense of home that they would take these powdered
eggs from the kitchen to the one little room they
might have.
"In the particular camp of which I am speaking,
there is a building where children are kept who
have wandered in off the road and have no older

OW DOES A MAN

get that way, especially a businessman, untrained
in welfare work and with a full-time job at his
own place of business?

• Can They Survive?

people with them. One little boy sang for me. He
sang a Jewish song. This boy was 10, but he didn't
look much more than six or seven. The doctor told
me that this little boy had just wandered in with
a younger brother, and they had been at the camp
ever since. They called him their 'singer' in the camp.
But that 10-year old looked like an old man.
"It is true that they want to go to Palestine. I
don't,.know what the Anglo-American Inquiry Com-
mittee will recommend—and, as you know, the
United Nations Organization is to set up a Com-
mittee that will go into the question of refugees,
with a view to making recommendations as to what
should happen when UNRRA does come to an end.
"It seems to me, however, that in the next few
months UNRRA will carry the burden of actually
seeing that people do not starve in those plaCes.
"I came home with the feeling that, every day,
each one of us should say: 'Thank God that my
roof is intact, that my room is warm' (and I think
we had better learn not to be quite so warm; I
think it would do us a great - deal of good) . .. 'and
thank God that we have enough to eat; that we
are not hungry.'
"The whole of Europe is hungry. But, worse than
that, the whole of Europe is without any social
structure. You see, the Nazis went through first and
wiped out 'all the people who were administering a
town of a village or a city. They exterminated them.
Then the Allies came along and we had to root out
whatever the Nazis had installed.
"I think the most important thing for us to realize
is the great responsibility that lies upon our shoul-
ders and the fact that we must give something be-
yond what we have ever given before—something
that is no longer for ourselves at all, but for human-
ity as a whole."
Mrs.' Levy saw the Jewish children of Western
Europe. Here are her observations:
"During the month I spent in France, Belgium
and Holland I saw and talked to the people who
had returned from the concentration camps. I saw
their hollow faces and their staring eyes, I visited
a child-care center in France where only a few days
before 200 young boys and girls had come back
from Nazi concentration camps.
"With funds raised by the United Jewish Appeal,
the JDC is at present providing care, vocational
training and rehabilitation aid to 65,000 of the 150,000
remaining Jewish children in Europe.
"There are two possible solutions to the problem
of the Jewish children: (a) they must be helped
to emigrate to Palestine, the United States and other
lands, or (b) the governments concerned must find
the means to assist these children to become part
of the life of these countries."
These children have first claim not only to our
sympathy and our understanding—they must receive
our fullest support through the $2,000,000 Allied
Campaign.

An Evaluation of His Valued Contributions to
Our City and to Jewry, on the Occasion of His
50th Birthday and His Election to the Presidency
of the Jewish Welfare Federation of Detroit.

in Detroit, and was a director of Priscilla Inn. So
his parents showed him the way. But besides, he
must have had an unusual amount of innate sym-
pathy' for. the less fortunate, and he still has a
burning indignation against brutality and oppres-
sion, and against people pushing other people
around.

Way back in 1904, at college, Julian was suf-
ficiently inflamed by the Kishineff pogroms to
organize a fund for the sufferers. And as soon as
he was graduated, he taught immigrants English
at the old Hannah Schloss Bldg. on Vernor near
Hastings. He credits Fred Butzel, his lifelong
friend and mentor, with inspiring and guiding
him in the field of social work, -and in many other
ways, but it is apparent that Julian didn't need
much pushing—he is that rare type of unselfish
person who feels sincerely that helping other
people is a mission and an obligation.

*

*

*

J

ULIAN HENRY KROLIK
was born on East High Street (now Vernor High-
way) , near Brush, April 9, 1886. That makes him
60 years old, but don't call him old or he may
give you an exhibition of the fistic prowess that
made him the terror of the neighborhood hi his
youth. He was, I discovered, a very fat boy in-
deed, which made him too slow for baseball but
just right for swimming (especially floating). He
attended Roberts and Washington grammar
schools shortly after the time that the park op-
posite Harper Hospital was Detroit's circus
grounds, and among his early recollections are
the three-wheeled wooden horse-drawn busses
that preceded our earliest electric street cars.
After graduation from Central High School,
Julian entered the University of Michigan, where
he roomed with Joseph Welt, and later, Emanuel
Frank. He was a good student, of course, and a
ham actor in a German play that he managed to
a profit. But the frivolities of "Joe's and the
Orient" he quickly put behind him after gradua-
tion in 1906. For he immediately entered the
wholesale dry goods business of A. Krolik & Co.,
founded by his father and his father's cousin and
brother. Ever since, he has worked faithfully and
hard, with his partners, to supply the merchants
of Detroit and Michigan with supplies of dry
goods.

H

IS MARRIAGE TO
Golda Ginsburg Mayer in 1936 could hardly have
dampened Julian's ardor for social work, for
Golda was publicity director of the Detroit Com-
munity Fund at the time. Since then, she has 'been
publicity director of the Office of Civilian Defense
and JWB hostess chairman of the USO. At present
Golda is one of the vice-presidents of the Women's
Division of the Jewish Welfare Federation, and
one can imagine that there is little chance for
small talk in their dinner conversations.
Golda, incidentally, was Women's Editor of the
University of Michigan Daily during her college
days.
There are four children in the family to further
delight and complicate the lives of the Julian
Kroliks. Henry Krolik is just out of the Army
and 'married; John Mayer is just out of the Navy
and at Wayne University; David Mayer is still
overseas in the Army, and Judith Mayer attends
Highland Park High School.
So we leave the Kroliks, surrounded by area
chairman appointments, V-mail letters, report
cards, worker teas, amours (junior division), fur-
nishings for newlyweds, board meetings, voca-
tional guidance, concerts, and a smidge of dry-
goods selling. Two grand people who have en-
riched our community beyond measure and to
whom all praise is due.