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No. 31. | Vienna, 3 August 1900. | Volume 4

* * * If we were united . . .

What avails all our lamenting; what purpose is served if we make the just reproach to the appointed Jewish charitable institutions that they have neglected to avert the crisis of the Roumanian emigration, which has threatened for so many years? Certainly the "Alliance Israélite," in which we older people set such great hopes — the youth of to-day can form no conception of the enthusiasm with which the creation of the unforgettable Crémieux once filled us! — has neglected its duty and forfeited its right to exist. Since 1878, the year of the Treaty of Berlin, the distress of the Roumanian Jews has been an open secret; the lawlessness of our co-religionists in Moldavia and Wallachia has been discussed more than once in the newspapers of all civilised states, for the Roumanian Government took care that ever new cases of crying outrage should occur and beset the ear of the public. Who does not remember the year 1886, when Dr. Gaster, then an ornament of the University of Bucharest, an eminent linguist and highly deserving investigator in the field of Roumanian philology and literary history, was driven from his native soil like a criminal because he had dared to make complaint of the barbarous proceedings against the Jews? Dr. Gaster has found an asylum in free England, and in the Portuguese congregation of London, as rabbi, a field of blessed activity; but how many ruined existences has the barbarism of the Roumanian Government upon its conscience?

All this was known to the whole civilised world, and can therefore hardly have remained entirely hidden from the men in power in the Alliance Israélite; indeed, as a London dignitary lately told us, everything — everything, we say — that concerns the Roumanian Jews is manifest to the united Alliances of France and England down to the smallest particular. And what have these gentlemen done in the twenty-two years since 1878 to avert an acute crisis in the distress of the Roumanian Jews? Nothing, nothing at all. And suddenly the emigration was upon us, "like a thief in the night, like an armed man."

But enough of this. We have no wish to repeat fruitless reproaches, we have no wish to squander useless words. The misery is here, of gigantic size, and is growing over the heads of all the officials of charity. The Alliances of Vienna and Paris are at their wits' end, those ready to help are powerless, and ever new emigrants knock at our Jewish heart.

What is to be done?

I should know well enough what ought to be done, but I am positively afraid to name the remedy, so simple is it and at the same time so utopian in its nature.

If we were really united, a people of brothers, as we once were and would fain be again; if we were thoroughly penetrated by the conviction of this belonging together, and if in accordance with that conviction we felt the duty of helping our persecuted brethren, then we should know well enough what to do with the poorest of them. Only think how easy it really is to distribute a few thousand uprooted Jews, willing and able to work, among a million settled, bread-winning Jews! There is of course no question of a distribution in the sense of absorption; we all know that this is no help. Things go badly enough with the settled, far too badly for them to maintain even a few thousand fugitives. No, it is only a question of a momentary expedient, of a help that is at this hour so urgently needed, because thousands of men and women, of aged people and children, pass the night under the open sky and beg for a piece of bread, in Roumania, in Asia Minor, in Cyprus, in Vienna, in Hamburg, in London — where not?

Thank God, there are still so many Jewish communities in Europe, communities with enormous budgets, that a systematic, well-organised distribution would lay an intolerable burden upon none of them. Let us assume that every larger congregation — Czernowitz, Lemberg, Cracow, Bruenn, Vienna, Prague; I follow the road of the emigrants — had taken over a hundred fugitives each for a short time: how small the burden would have been, how great the help, what misery would thereby have been removed with comparatively slender means! And