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No. 32. | Vienna, 10 August 1900. | Fourth Year

Our Social Tasks.

By Dr. Siegmund Werner.

That was in those August days of the year 1897, at Basle. There Zionist Jewry made its confession of faith before all the world; and above the assembly there sounded the mysterious rushing of the old, eternally young longing of the Jewish people, which stirred its wings mightily — the wings which official Jewry believed it had so thoroughly removed. That was a wondrous sounding. To the height of that event the ill-sounding croaking from the lowlands of the worldly-wise Mere-Mosaics could not reach. The mighty melody of those days we shall not forget, even though the clamour of the working-day has already brought us many a dissonance and may bring us many another. We feel the strength within us to resolve these dissonances into full-toned chords, and to fuse whatever seems to disturb the euphony of the Zionide into complete accord with it.

We are growing. We feel it in every limb, as every growing thing feels it. These are the pains of ripening. What is about us alters its dimensions along with us. What formerly awakened in us something like awe — the daily life around us, which seemed to have so little immediate contact with the life within us — has moved nearer to us. Not with the eye of one who divines, but with that of one who knows, do we mean to regard it, and to perform what the To-day demands without forgetting the To-morrow. Over the task of our life we will not neglect the requirements of the day; for the To-day is yesterday's To-morrow, as it is the To-morrow's Yesterday. Not to be loosed from the connection to which it owes its being, whose tasks it has, as a part, to take up and to hand on.

That the Jews of to-day had forgotten. They would most gladly have blotted out the Yesterday altogether, because at first the To-day appeared to them so fair. Neither did they think it needful to think of the future, given over wholly to the present. Then, when the To-day had so shamefully disappointed their hopes, they searched anxiously among the ruins of the Yesterday, too impotent to shape the To-morrow for themselves. Out of the Ghetto they had rescued almost nothing, the dream of freedom they saw vanished — such was the inheritance which Zionism found before it. It is conscious of its task. Scarcely has it broken its own path when it takes up the thread again there where only single threads are still preserved. These it would weave into a firm fabric for the future. But it has to intervene most cautiously, and yet most decidedly, where the social needs of the Jewish people are concerned.

In former times the Jews were thrown upon themselves in all altruistic institutions. It was the Jewish congregation that cared for its members when these proved too weak in the struggle for life. It was the Jewish community that stepped in for the congregations when these were too heavily burdened. Every Jew knew that. So he came as a brother to a brother, as an equal to equals. The Hekdesch, where the Jew who was a stranger in the land found shelter and food, the Schule, the Klaus — they served as social institutions. Every father of a family respected the Plett (billet) which assigned the strange Jew to his table. He received him as a "guest"; that was the title with which the master of the house addressed the stranger before the latter named his name. The Jews' hospital tended the stranger when he was sick. That was done unconditionally; to that every man had a claim. And if the congregation was too poor to procure for the newcomer even his bread for life, then he was sent with recommendations to a congregation where he could be placed — and was placed. There people were not sent away merely to be rid of them, without concern whether they might not perish by the way. There, too, social-political insight was not yet so great that men hit upon the ingenious thought of founding societies against vagrant mendicancy, and of seeking, by anthropometric measurements, and if need be by the issue of a formal warrant of description, to preserve their dear fellow-men from the crime of assisting an unsettled brother.

All this, and many other similar institutions of the Ghetto, the Jews of to-day have given up, or have preserved only in pitiful remnants. Here and there, it is true, a change has set in. Where the intoxication of freedom vanished, where the fairy-tale of equality of rights could no longer be maintained, where