That the Roumanian government is financially supporting the anti-Semitic students movement was made clear from the proceedings of the students congress held here last week.
At the congress, one of the participants, the student Danulescu, reported that Roumanian Minister of the Interior Goga gave the congress arrangements committee the sum of 20,000 lei for the publication of a book devoted to a description of the students movement and its demand for the introduction of a numerus nullus against Jewish students in Roumanian Universities.
DENOUNCES “BENEVOLENT HOSTILITY” OF PRITCHETT REPORT; ISSUES CHALLENGE FOR PROOF OF HARM TO ARABS
An extensive reply to the charges made against the Zionist movement and against the Jewish endeavors to rebuild Palestine as the Jewish national home by Dr. Henry S. Pritchett, trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, published last week in the metropolitan press and in the “International Conciliation”, the organ of the endowment, was made Sunday by Dr. Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, and Dr. Stephen S. Wise.
The Free Synagogue at Carnegie Hall was crowded to capacity to listen to authoritative arguments of the recognized leader of the Zionist movement. Answering in detail the various charges made by Dr. Pritchett, Dr. Weizmann questioned the impartiality and objectiveness of the report.
Dr. Wise, who introduced Dr. Weizmann, termed the Pritchett report “a theological discussion” and “an exparte condemnation, directed not only against the Jews, but, by implication, also against Great Britain and against the League of Nations.” Dr. Pritchett, he said, has gone to Palestine “for a fortnight in order to fortify his prejudices.”
JEWS WILL NOT TURN BACK, ASSERTS DR. WEIZMANN
Dr. Weizmann, in the course of his address, gave expression to his conviction that “the assaults of superficial and ungenerous critics will not turn the Jews back from Palestine. “The Jews are a stubborn people,” he said. There is room in Palestine for settling 3,000,000 Jews without displacing the Arabs,” he declared. Palestine at one time supported a population of from three to four millions and there was no reason why it could not do it again today. At present, he declared, there are only 700,000 persons living there, of which 100,00 are Jews. He continued:
“Under present conditions of soil-cultivation by the Arabs, only one-third is used, and the rest lies fallow. If the intensity of cultivation is only increased twofold there would still be plenty of room for the Arabs. By a conservative estimate, 100,000 agricultural families can be absorbed in the South, while industry will take 200,000 more families. When we have placed this number of people we can meet again and consider the situation.”
CONCILIATION WITH BRANDEIS GROUP EXPECTED
When interviewed later by newspaper representatives, Dr. Weizmann gave out a report that during his last visit to Washington, he met Justice Louis D. Brandeis of the United States Supreme Court and former leader of the Zionist movement in the United States. This was their first meeting, the “Jewish Daily Bulletin” understands, since the Cleveland convention. It was also stated that a conciliation between the Brandeis group and the Zionist Organization of America, may be expected soon.
Dr. Weizmann, who during his address did not name Dr. Pritchett or the Carnegie Endowment, exclaimed: “Where were these lovers of peace and of justice during the last twelve years, when thousands of Jews were being slaughtered in the anti-Semitic countries of Europe, and when twelve million Jews between the Volga and the Rhine were being threatened with spiritual and economic extermination? Why is it that the first notice which they take of the world-wide problem comes in the form of an attack on the most important constructive enterprise which the Jews have undertaken in the last twenty centuries?”
PRITCHETT REPORT TERMED “BENEVOLENT HOSTILITY”
Dr. Weizmann saw in “the benevolent hostility” of Dr. Pritchett’s report what he termed “the symptoms of a universal fear that Jewish work in Palestine was raising the whole Near East out of that state of tutelage which a number of forces, some of them in Moscow, others in Rome and still others in New York, were anxious to maintain. There are individuals and movements,” charged Dr. Weizmann, “who deliberately play on the primitive fears of a backward people in the Near East in order that they may the better further their own plans.
“The building of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine,” said Dr. Weizmann, “is not that obscure, intriguing affair which some people make it out to be. The agreement to give the homeless and persecuted Jewish people an opportunity to rebuild a homeland was not reached furtively. It was approved by every signatory to the covenant of the League of Nations. It was approved separately by the United States of America. It has today the status of international law, and the clauses of the agreement, framed after long deliberation, are as thoughtful in regard to the Arabs as to the Jews. The second half of the Balfour Declaration, which was issued by the British Government in complete agreement with the allied and Associated Powers and which concedes to the Jews the right to build a national home in Palestine, guarantees to the Arab people full protection of their civic, political and religious rights.”
DENOUNCES “NEW-FOUND” FRIENDS OF ARABS
Speaking of “those new-found friends of the Arabs, who have sprung up in astonishing fashion in the most unexpected places,” Dr. Weizmann said: “They forget that the Arab people have been given the fullest consideration. Three Arab states have been recognized: the Hedjas, Transjordania and Mesopotamia. Palestine does not represent one-twentieth of the area recognized as Arab. And even in Palestine, the land which has been made eternally Jewish by the people which produced the Bible, the Arabs are treated with the tenderest regard to their rights and even to their susceptibilities. And it is remarkable enough that while these critics concentrate their attention on Palestine, and hold up the Zionist efforts as the most dangerous feature in the Near Eastern situation, the country itself is perhaps the only peaceful and progressive spot in the entire region. There is no Zionism in Syria, there is no Zionism Egypt-yet these countries have bristled with bayonets for the last four or five years. But Palestine, during that same period, has remained perfectly tranquil, and the British garrison has been gradually reduced in that country until today the sole force maintained there consists of two hundred and fifty British soldiers and a gendarmerie recruited entirely from the local population.
OUR PROGRAM IS ONE OF WORK, SAYS WEIZMANN
“The Jews are immigrating, or re-immigrating, into Palestine openly, without pretence and without fear. Given at last an opportunity to answer the Jewish problem by Jewish labor and Jewish self-sacrifice, we have put forth an effort which has commanded the respect and commendation of the most exacting non-political experts. We come to Palestine not as conquering colonizers, nor as missionaries and proselytizers. We do not want to impose our views on anybody, nor ram salvation down anyone’s throat. Our program is one of work. In seven years we have brought one hundred thousand Jews into the country. We have founded sixty new agricultural colonies: we have built new cities, opened scores of new industries and introduced the methods of the progressive west into a land languishing in ignorance and neglect. The more we have succeeded, the friendlier have become our relations with the Arabs. Six years ago, when our work was untested and our motives and our methods unknown, Arab fear reached its righest point. That fear was exploited by politicians, most of them non-Palestinian, with the interest of neither the Jews nor the Arabs at heart. Since then not a single riot has taken place. Today England, the most cautious of countries, no longer thinks it necessary to maintain a British force in Palestine-though the Arabs outnumber the Jews by five to one. For centuries the Jew and the Arab have known how to cooperate: and they can cooperate in the future. The present tranquility of the country is not accidental. It is the result of the scrupulous attention which the Government and the Zionist Organization have given to the rights of the Arabs. The critics of the Zionist movement are challenged to produce, from the records of the High Commissioner of Palestine, or from those of the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, a single instance of oppression or of injustice. Not one Arab has had to leave Palestine because of Jewish immigration. With modern and rational methods of agriculture, there is room in Palestine for three and four times its present population. The Jews have paid to a willing seller for every inch of land which they cultivate. Their enterprises have brought to the Arabs direct profits in the way of income and indirect profits in the way of object lessons. And all the evidence points to an increase of cooperation between the two peoples. But it is absolutely essential that ‘friends’ of this description keep their hands off. What Palestine needs is not politicians from abroad, but sympathy, capital and practical cooperation.
WEST FAILS TO APPRECIATE SIGNIFICANCE OF PALESTINE RECONSTRUCTION
“I believe that the world significance of the peaceful rebuilding of Palestine is not fully appreciated in the West. It has implications which stretch out far beyond Palestine. To Lord Cecil, one of the major figures in the World Peace movement, the establishment of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine is, in his own words, ‘of equal significance with the establishment of the League of Nations.’ It represents a unique attempt to solve a great problem by the method of industry and of peace rather than by the force of arms. Granted the success of the experiment, there can be created in the Near East a new relationship between the Christian, the Moslem and the Jewish worlds–a relationship of the profoundest importance. It is obvious that individual institutions devoted ostensibly to the cause of world peace should watch the experiment with the most sympathetic attention. If they are unable to give a helping hand, they might at least understand the agony which impels the Jewish people to this effort and the sympathy which moved the civilized peoples of the world to give it their sanction and support and hold their peace.
“One thing must be remembered. The lives of millions of Jews are involved in this effort to rebuild a stable and peaceful Jewish Home and, side by side with a friendly Arab world. The Jews are a stubborn people, and the occasional assaults of superficial and ungenerous critics will not turn them back along the one road which leads to the solution of their problem.”
Dr. Wise, in introducing Dr. Weizmann, declared: “You and I last Monday morning read what was called a report. I for one, as a Zionist, was tremendously keen about reading that report. I expected a report. What I read was an indictment. It was not a report. I think that only by a very generous stretch of the imagination could that document be called a report. But then, of course, the writer of the report is a ‘scientist.’ And you know, when scientists lapse into inexperience, they have a capacity for achieving a supreme degree of inexpertness, when once they venture out of their own fields.
“Dr. Pritchett is an astronomer. He looked at the imagined grievances of Arabs through a telescope, then he put his telescope aside and looked at Jewish achievements in Palestine through a microscope. A scientist has a perfect right to use a telescope or a microscope at will.
“An American gentleman and scholar, in the name of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, goes to Palestine, which is the British mandatory territory of the League of Nations, and brings home a report which is an ex-parte condemnation, not only of the Jews, gloriously struggling to translate the noblest of dreams into noblest fulfillment, but what is ifinitely more grave, by implication, an indictment and condemnation alike of Great Britain and the League of Nations, which after all have translated the Balfour Declaration into a paragraph of the International Statutes of humankind.
“Dr. Pritchett represented the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The business of the Carnegie Endowment, I want to say to Dr. Butler, its President, is to make peace and not to stir up strife. The business of the Carnegie Endowment, if it report on affairs in a foreign land, is to hold the balance judicially, not to have a man come back to the Carnegie Endowment with a theological treatise. That is what Dr. Pritchett’s report is-a query as to the implications of the theological doctrine of the chosen people. I am not dealing with the question and I don’t intend to, whether we are a Godchosen or a God-choosing people. But that I have to say to Dr. Pritchett: We have chosen in part and in part we have been compelled to choose. The World has left us no alternative, the World of egotistic nationalities. We have chosen to do a great thing. Within the depths of that misery which Eastern Europe has inflicted upon half of our people, within the depth of our faith that we have the right and under God the duty to rebuild the collective life of our own, we have resolved to build. In that resolution we have first, the support of the British government; next, and more important to us, the support of the American people, as affirmed and reaffirmed by three Presidents-Wilson, Harding and Coolidge. We have the sympathy and the understanding of the American people, of both the great English-speaking peoples in the world. We have, as a people who love peace, made every sacrifice in the interest of peace and understanding in Palestine and we have achieved it. We have peace with the Arabs, save among the renegade Mohammedans, and in the group of absentee landlords in Egypt and in Syria whose bitterness against us arises, not out of our oppression of the Arabs, which they know does not exist, but because under God we are doing a mighty thing. We are liberating the serfs of Palestine. We are helping to free the Arabs, to lift them to new levels of life. That is what the Jewish resettlement of Palestine has done.
“As the leader of the Free Synagogue, and as one of the men in the Zionist cause, I am very glad that today there will be lifted up an authentic voice, not the voice of an observer who goes to Palestine for a fortnight in order to fortify his prejudices but one who knows Palestine, one who has mightly served Palestine.”
PROTESTANTS, CATHOLICS AND JEWS ATTEND MEETING FOR JEWISH RELIEF AT EPISCOPAL CATHEDRAL
The suggestion that the Christians of America raise the amount of $25,000,000 to equal that which is now being raised by the Jews of America, under the auspices of the Joint Distribution Committee, to aid suffering Jews in Eastern Europe, was made by General John J. Pershing, leader of America’s forces in the World War, in his address delivered Sunday night at a joint Protestant, Catholic and Jewish mass meeting held at the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Relief Committee, was the spokesman of the Jews at the meeting over which Bishop William T. Manning presided. Major General John F. O’Ryan, outstanding Catholic layman, Dr. S. Parkes Cadman, Methodist minister and president of the Federal Council of Churches, spoke-Notwithstanding the heavy storm Sunday which continued throughout the evening, over 1,500 persons, including many Jews, attended the mass-meeting . The meeting, which was the first of its kind in the history of the Christian church, was arranged by the American Christian Fund for Jewish Relief, an organization headed by Dr. Cadman and formed in November on the initiative of leading Christian clergymen, coming as a spontaneous effort to aid in the United Jewish Campaign.
The Cathedral, which is now in the process of completion, and toward which several leading New York Jews contributed in last year’s campaign, resounded to the tune of Kol Nidre, the Jewish religious melody which ushers in the sacred atmosphere of the Day of Atonement Kol Nidre was played on the organ preceding and after the Protestant services conducted by Bishop Manning, who also offered a prayer to God for “Thy children, the people of Israel.”
Dr. Cadman announced several contributions by prominent Christians. A collection was also made but the amount was not announced.
Telegrams were read from Governor Alfred E. Smith, Chief Justice William H. Taft, Nathan Straus, and Vice-President Dawes.
BISHOP MANNING’S ADDRESS
Bishop William T. Manning, who presided, made the following address:
“I feel it a special privilege to preside at this mass meeting here in the cathedral tonight. The occasion is one of unusual significance. It is the first time that a meeting has been held in this cathedral, and, so far as I know, the first time that a meeting has been held in any Christian cathedral, specifically in behalf of the Jewish people. I rejoice in the fact that this meeting is held here to show our sympathy and express our fellowship and extend our help to the suffering Jews in Europe.
“The lives of 5,000,000 Jewish men and women and children are at stake. Our Jewish fellow-Americans are sending their help nobly to their stricken brethren.
“But the American Jews cannot do it all. The need is too great for them to meet it. And we cannot allow them to do it all. The Christians of America must have a share in this great work of mercy. The call that comes from those suffering mothers and starving babies is the call of our common humanity; it speaks to all of us alike, Christians and Jews, Protestants and Catholics–and it is one to which Christians should be quick to respond. How could we more truly act in the spirit of the Good Samaritan than by sending our help to those Jewish people in the Old World in their great need?
“I welcome the distinguished speakers who are to present this cause to you, and I hope that this meeting may have the effect of stirring a great wave of fellowship and human sympathy which shall show itself in generous gifts for this relief fund. I hope that a great offering for the fund will be made at this meeting tonight, and opportunity for this will be given a little later. Let the message go from this meeting tonight in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to the Jewish people in those far-off lands that we think of them and sympathize with them in their sufferings, and that we claim the privilege of sending them our help.”
JEWS HAVE DONE FULL PART, SAYS GENERAL PERSHING
General Pershing in his address said he had not heard of the meeting until Saturday, but that he had regarded it as “a great honor and privilege to participate in a meeting in this great cathedral for the Jewish relief fund.”
“Jews are an essential part of America,” he continued. “As citizens among us they have always done their full part. When the time came to serve their country under arms no class of people served with more patriotism or with higher motives than the young Jews who volunteered or were drafted and who went overseas with our other young Americans. I well remember in my inspections of New York divisions seeing so many patriotic, well-disciplined, well-behaved young Jewish soldiers, whose commanders spoke of them in the highest terms.
“During the war,” General Pershing went on, “there was no such thing as race or creed-they were forgotten. During this campaign they also should be forgotten. It is for generous Americans, of whatever religion, to aid the Jews of America in succoring their brethren overseas. The Jews of America have always been in the forefront of charitable works. There has never been an attempt to raise a large sum of money for a public cause in which the Jews have not done more than their share. It is up to the Christians of America to show that they appreciate what the Jews have done in the past.
“The spirit of this occasion appeals to me tremendously. This gathering should be the beginning of an era of good will that should spread throughout America. It is not so much a question of giving as it is of showing the proper spirit. A spirit of goodwill is needed in America today. It could have no better beginning than here in New York in this great cathedral.
“It is a difficult thing for us in our prosperous country to imagine just what suffering those poor people overseas are going though. This is an occasion for all Americans, whether Christians or what not, to show our Jewish friends that we have charitable instincts and that there is no such thing as race prejudice in this great country. To my mind this is one of the great lessons we can teach the people of Europe by contributing to this fund.”
Recalling that he had been brought up as a Methodist, and that “the Methodists are the greatest beggars in the world,” he said he wanted to hark back to his Methodism and appeal to Christian America to give much greater contributions to the Jewish fund than they have contemplated.
URGES CHRISTIANS GIVE $25,000,000
“I feel sure that this undertaking will meet with very cordial and generous response all over the country,” he went on, “especially if New York City gives it the right kind of start. Christians of America ought to raise at least as much as the Jews themselves ars raising. Twenty-five millions are not too much for the Christians to raise to help these poor people over there. The Jews will raise their twenty-five millions all right, and if the Christians can not duplicate it–well, I don’t know, I’d like to tell them what I think about them.”
Bishop Manning in introducing Mr. Marshall stated that he had learned that Mr. Marshall will celebrate his seventieth birthday on December 14 and he offered him the best wishes of his congregation and himself.
“Behold how good and how pleasant it is ‘For brethren to dwell together in unity,” Mr. Marshall began his address.
“This gathering which is the outcome of the earnest strivings of American’s Good Will Union for the removal of the barriers artificially erected between the various members of the human family, is a noble exhibition of that spiritual elevation attainable thru the practice of the essential principles of religion, rather than thru the mere profession of it. Upon this platform Protestants, Catholics and Jews meet as equals to speed a movement dedicated to the relief of suffering humanity agonizing in unspeakable misery–the innocent victims of an endless chain of ills running back into the past centuries and reaching their culmination in our own day.
NOBLE AND UNPRECEDENTED, LOUIS MARSHALL DECLARES
“A distinguished committee of Christians prominent in every walk of our national life, is engaged in the inspiring undertaking of gathering the American Christian Fund for Jewish Relief, intended to assuage the sufferings of and once more to plant upon their feet the unfortunate Jews of Eastern Europe. It is noble as a conception as it is unprecedented. It brings together those great symbols of enlightened civilization: American, Christian and Jewish. What a world of thought is embodied in the joinder of these three words! What a story each of them separately has to tell! What a glorious future they forebode if their inward harmony could only be recognized, Christian and Jew each in his own way striving to create the ideal American of the founders of the Republic and a better world.
“For twelve years the Jews of the United States have striven practically alone to keep alive their brethren in Poland, Lithuania, Roumania, Bessarabia and Russia, five millions of whom were literally threatened with extinction. Pestilence, war, famine, insane prejudice, persecution and massacres were their daily experience. They dwelt in the midst of perpetual alarms. Economically they were ruined, and even in their indescribable wretchedness they were often subjected to hateful discrimination. Yet throughout all their woes they have been sustained by the consolation of their religion, by trust in God, by the hope of a better day and by the consciousness that their brethren in America had not forgotten them and were thinking of them, not as paupers, but as equals, as brothers. Wherever the representatives of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee penetrated they were told by the wretched, famine-stricken and disease-ridden masses that more than food, more than medicine, more than aught that was material, they were sustained by the thought that far across the sea there were those who possessed understanding hearts that throbbed in sympathy with theirs.
“And so, my friends, when in October last our organization met at Chicago, with representatives from all parts of America, in conference to arrange plans for the completion of the $25,000,000. Fund which were engaged in raising to supplement the $62,000,000 previously distributed, the telegram announcing the formation of the American Christian Committee for Jewish Relief came to us like manna in the wilderness, like the dew of heaven on parched soil. We too felt that we no longer stood all alone, that we as Jews were no longer struggling with our own sorrow without the touch of sympathetic souls from without the House of Israel, save in the case of a few glorious men and women who understand what Burns meant:
“‘Affliction’s sons are brothers in distress.
‘A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss!’
MARSHALL LAUDS MAGNANIMITY OF CHRISTIAN COMMITTEE
“We rejoice that your Committee has now, acting upon its own initiative, determined to participate in this undertaking, not because we have regarded it as a burden, but because of your magnanimous desire to share the privilege of bearing testimony to the truth of Seneca’s exalted thought, that no man comes so near to the gods as one who shows kindness to men.
“Great as our appreciation of your spirit, let me add that you cannot realize how it will impress the Jews of Eastern Europe bearing the rankling wounds of centuries, the contumely, the rancor, the hatred of those among whom they have been suffered to exist, when they shall learn that American Christians feel with them and for them and are seeking to befriend them and to enable them to understand that with no motive but that of human fellowship and brotherhood, they are ready to lift them out of the Slough of Despond. Whether your material contributions be large or small, this you should know, that the Jews are a grateful people who judge an act by the spirit which directs it.
“It may be well for a fuller understanding, to remind you that in rendering aid to suffering humanity in Eastern Europe the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee devoted millions of dollars to help non-Jews in the stricken lands, to provide them with food and medicines and clothing, that it contributed large sums toward carrying out the non-sectarian Child-Feeding Work of the American Relief Administration under Mr. Hoover, toward the repatriation of the Czechs who were stranded in Siberia, and in numerous other ways. It is needless to add that the Jews of the United States have made in the aggregate large contributions to the American Red Cross, to the Young Men’s Christian Association, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Knights of Columbus and the Salvation Army.
GOOD WILL SHOULD BE MUTUAL, HE SAYS
“In pointing out these facts I am neither claiming credit for the Jews nor asking for reciprocity. I am merely attempting to illustrate how necessary is the spirit of good-will. It must not be one-sided. It should be mutual. It should not partake of the arrogance of superiority on the one hand or of the degradation of inferiority on the other. It must not be based on the idea of toleration. No self-respecting man will consent to be tolerated; nor will he suffer the impairment of his dignity by permitting himself to be patronized. Nor does it mean that any of us should be expected to surrender or to abate his conscientious convictions or his philosophy of life, or that it is to be assumed that all men should be like-minded on all subjects or should become standardized machines. What it should mean is set forth in the oft-repeated sententious, simple, homely words of Malachi, whose inner content have for ages been honored in the breach rather than in the observance:
“‘Have we not all one Father?
Hath not one God created us?’
“That is the proclamation of human brotherhood, which, to adapt the admirable expression of Owen D. Young, ‘is a universal solvent of all problems.’ From it spring those deeds of human kindness which you are exemplifying and upon which in the striking phrase of an ancient Talmudist ‘standeth the world.’
“The world has indeed been making rapid strides toward the acceptance of these ideals. Its horizon has been extended. There is a growing appreciation of the importance of interchanging points of view, of departing from the attitude that our own ideals must prevail and that those who are other minded must be wrong, that we are not concerned with the problems or troubles of other nations or of groups other than those to which we happen to belong. We should rather study their virtues, their experiences, their contributions to the art of right living. We should not emphasize differences, but those things on which there is agreement in principle. Nor have we the right to divest ourselves of responsibility for the inequalities existing among mankind. Thinking men and women in large numbers are every day adopting the broader and more humane view that every one of us is his brother’s keeper and that the obligation involved is not bounded by seas or mountains and is not confined to special groups or individuals. At this time especially and speaking under the auspices which have brought about this important convocation, we may all unite in these words from the Universal Prayer, written two centuries ago, with a better understanding of their full significance than has ever before existed:
“‘Teach me to feel another’s woe,
To hide the fault I see:
That mercy I to others show,
That mercy show to me,'”
Mr. Marshall concluded.
Major Gen. John F. O’Ryan, one of the best-known Catholic laymen in New York, said:
MAJOR O’RYAN DWELLS ON LNSPIRING OCCASION
“It is a splendid and inspiring occasion, this gathering of Christians in a great Christian Cathedral for the purpose of helping the suffering Jews of other lands.
“I feel certain that this great meeting will aid materially the Jews of Europe who are now in such dire need of our financial help. What is inspiring is that the spirit of charity and of sympathy which actuates the movement is truly Christian in that it goes forth without unfavorable restriction or limitation as to creed, race or nationality.
“What is even more inspiring is the example here furnished to all classes of Christians of the practical application of Christianity’s fundamental precept, to ‘Do unto others as we would have others do for us.’ Had Christians followed and practiced this golden rule an occasion of this character would call for no comments of satisfaction or surprise upon the basis that the objects of our present solicitude are outside the Christian fold. If the Christian world were truly Christian, movements similar to this would be in vogue throughout that world whenever the need existed.
“So common has been the misguided zeal of Christians, not only in their relations with non-Christians but among themselves, that many individuals have described the organization of the Christian Church upon the ground that the magnitude and complexity of that organization and the rules and regulations of its discipline have tended to obscure the simple rules of living which they were really designed to uphold.
“In Europe today there are not lacking communities where credulity supports the belief that upon occasions the Jews surreptitiously make human sacrifice–Christians, of course.
‘Human conduct has always been more inspired by example than by precept, and so the movement which brings us together tonight will accomplish more for the cause of toleration toward the Jews in Europe than any symposium that we might write or plea that we could make.
“There is presented an opportunity to demonstrate to them that Christian good-will is not a hoax. There is offered here the opportunity to make up, to the extent of the sacrifice involved in your gifts, for some of the many inhumanities practiced in the past by Christians in their relation with their Jewish fellow-men.
“From this meeting let there go forth to our own people the meaning of what is here done, that we recognized that Christian charity and good-will know no limitation of race or creed and that even among us who make this effort there are represented all elements making up the great and divided Christian family.
“Remember, too, in making your gifts, the splendid examples of charity and tolerance ever being displayed by our own Jews of America. Whenever a Christian people have lifted a brutal heel from the neck of Jewish people and have given them the opportunity to live with them on terms of equality and good-will, the Jews have responded as if by magic. Although the marks of generations of Christian persecution may be upon them, accompanied at times by deficiencies inseperable from such servitude, they have demonstrated their ability in a few short generations to forget and forgive, to develop and to serve, and to give to us examples of the Christian charity that was withheld from them by Christian people for so long a period.
“Here in our City of New York, where there are more Jews than are assembled in any other city of the world, where the contacts between Christian and Jew are more intimate and more accurately appraised than is possible anywhere else, let our Christian response in behalf of Jews who are in need be our overwhelming and evincing proof of how we who know them best regard their worth.”
DR. CADMAN SEES MEETING AS BLOW TO RACE HATRED
Dr. Cadman said that the Cathedral last night was “in a real sense the mother church.” Referring to the Jewish story of the man who went into a pit to slay a bear, he continued:
“If we can only slay this bear of bigotry, hate and misunderstanding. our deed will deserve to be ranked with that which has such a high place in your history. As surely as we owe our law to Rome and our culture to Greece, we owe a far larger obligation, our religion, which should be the first business of a free people, to Israel.
“Let us send out to the world from this mother church this stormy night the message that we have struck a fatal blow at the bear of prejudice, race consciousness and hate which hitherto has hindered the progress of humanity.”
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