Die Welt

Appears every Friday.

Editorial Office and Administration: VIENNA IX., Türkenstrasse No. 9. Telephone 14199.

Communications are to be addressed not to individual persons, but to the Editorial Office or the Administration: Vienna, IX., Türkenstrasse No. 9.

Unstamped letters are not accepted, and manuscripts are not returned.

Advertising rates: The four-column petit line, 20 Heller. The advertisement department closes on Tuesday evening. Single numbers 30 Heller.

Subscription rates: Austria-Hungary: 12 Kronen yearly, 6 Kronen half-yearly. For abroad: Germany 13 Mk. 70 Pf. yearly, 6 Mk. 85 Pf. half-yearly; England 14 shillings yearly, 7 shillings half-yearly; Russia 7 R. yearly, 3 R. 50 kop. half-yearly; Switzerland, France, Italy, Turkey, Roumania, Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, Egypt 17 frcs. yearly, 8 frcs. 50 cts. half-yearly; America 3 doll. 40 cts. yearly.

No. 25. | Vienna, 22 June 1900. | Fourth Year

As many subscriptions expire at the end of the month, timely renewal is requested. Remittances from Russia are best made in registered letters. Paper money of all states is accepted in payment; in place of small coin, postage stamps should be enclosed.

The Jews of Stanislau.

Y.— A strange piece of news fluttered about a week ago through the pages of the Jewish press. The Jews of Stanislau have hindered Roumanian Jews — brethren who sought to escape from hunger and from other grievous suffering — from resting upon their threshold.

Told without any circumlocution: Jews who possess a home drove homeless, breadless men, harried weary in body and soul, who sought with them a few hours of rest for the tired body and refreshment for the bowed spirit — pitilessly out of their town.

Let it be said once more: the Jews of Stanislau induced the authorities to thrust the Roumanian fugitives out of their town with the help of musket-butts and bayonets.

Since there are people who look for some fault in every unfortunate who has been done violence to, we remark at once that the Roumanian Jews made themselves guilty of no offence whatever in Stanislau. They had no opportunity for it: the gendarmes hindered them from alighting.

Let one picture it to oneself: they are poor, harried people who for months have found no employment, who leave their homeland, the place of their birth, the graves of their departed; who squander their last possessions in order to purchase themselves a place in the rolling wooden house that is to carry them away out of the land of their sufferings. They sit penned together among their bundles, which still contain a small remnant of bedding or of clothes. The air in the carriage grows close and stifling; they press towards the window to fill the breast with a little oxygen. The coal-dust penetrates throat and lung, the bright glow of the summer sun burns down; that dries up the humours and frets the palate to a tormenting thirst. The children above all suffer, and they give audible expression to their torments. Again and again another seeks a fleeting solace at the open window. Some too, in spite of the drifting coal-dust, gaze forward with greedy eye. Up yonder the town must show itself, where the first halt is to be made, where hospitable brethren wait. The journey will take no end; the carriages clatter and roll, the children wail, the women sigh, the men are worn out. At last the town is to be seen, the men rise up, the women reach for the children, all weariness has fled, even the carriages grow quiet, they move slowly and with a gentle roll towards the long-desired Stanislau.

And while, relieved, they reach for their bundles in order to come out of the stifling air into the open, they hear imperious words of command, the clash of arms; they may not leave the narrow wooden walls — —

The locomotive whistles, the signal sounds, the carriage moves with a sharp jerk, the men fall with their bundles upon the seats, the women reel, the children wail, and pitilessly it goes onward and out, into the dark, compassionless strange land — breadless, restless, homeless.

But the Jews of Stanislau, gazing after them, go home content and lay themselves down to bed with a quieted mind. Not all of them. The people, what one calls the people, had come to the railway station to support the fleeing brethren, to refresh them. But the representatives of the people, the representative Jews, those who in the community and in office represent Jewry, it was they who moved the Imperial and Royal authority to its dispositions; they had the weary, hungering kinsmen driven out of Stanislau.

It sounds improbable, almost incredible.

Such worthlessness one is unwilling to believe even when one knows more nearly the rich Galician Jews, these Poles of the Mosaic confession: the women hang themselves about with glittering jewellery and make parade of borrowed phrases out of foreign tongues which they do not understand; their whole life fritters itself away in cares of fashion and in refined externals which are to veil their origin.

In the men all the instincts of self-interest are alive.