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No. 47. | Vienna, 23 November 1900. | Fourth Year

The Zionists and the Elections in the Vienna Jewish Community.

To the Jewish Electors!

For the first time the Vienna Zionists enter the electoral contest, with the settled resolve to send their men into the Jewish communal council-chamber.

Through all manner of foolish or malicious rumours put abroad by our enemies, the most singular judgments concerning us Zionists are in circulation.

What do we Zionists want?

We wish to create for our suffering brethren of all lands a home in Palestine; we wish to give work and bread to the millions of Jews who now hunger and schnorr, who, stripped of their rights and enslaved, are wasting away in body and soul. It is a wonderfully great cause, a mighty undertaking, perhaps the mightiest that history knows, if only because it concerns the oldest civilised people in the world. Is it a useless undertaking? The frightful Roumanian catastrophe of this year alone suffices to prove the necessity of a systematic regulation of Jewish emigration. And yet the number of the suffering is a thousandfold greater, and yet there are Jewish catastrophes everywhere and at all times. To create a home in Palestine for our oppressed — that is the chief part of our programme. This programme is served by an organisation which spreads its nets over the whole world and embraces many, many hundreds of thousands of adherents. Where there are Jews, there Zionism also dwells. It is at home in America as in Australia. Into the deserts of Africa, into the steppes of Bessarabia, into the mountain world of the Caucasus — wherever offshoots of the homeless people dwell, thither has our thought penetrated, filling the hearts of the bowed down with new hope and joining anew the world-scattered members of Judah. What had been lost to us through 2000 years, the unity and the union of the willing forces of Jewry, Zionism has attained in the course of a few years. It must be a great, a wonderful thought that is able to undo the work of destruction of two millennia. Even the original opponent stands stricken before the mighty spectacle of the Zionist Congresses. Many hundreds of delegates from all lands and quarters of the globe make manifest, in every tongue yet with one accord of enthusiasm, their fellowship with the Jewish people, their fellowship with Zionism. Among them are writers, artists, scholars whose names have a world-wide renown; there are freethinkers among them and strictly orthodox rabbis, the wealthy and the poor, youths and greybeards, men and women. Zionism has brought them to one another and has bound them inwardly together.

The Zionist work of liberation is a necessity. For the Jewish distress is immense, and the colonisation of the suffering the only way out. The Zionist movement is a highly ethical one, not only because it strives after a renaissance of Jewish culture, not only because it represents an eminently social-political undertaking; it is so already because it has succeeded, even to-day, in uniting the moral forces of Jewry, and above all the youth that already stands aloof and the Jewish intelligence, for work rich in blessing.

But Zionism is also a thoroughly practical movement. Zionism seeks to fulfil the social and cultural needs of the Jews in the most ideal form, in that it brings fulfilment to the thousand-year longing of the people: freedom in its own land. Our plan, however, stands upon sure ground. That the Jewish people is willing to strain its material forces it has proved by creating the "Jewish Colonial Bank". That we have the sympathies of political Europe is proved, besides the pronouncements of princes, statesmen, politicians and the most eminent scholars and artists, by the fact of most recent date, that some 40 English parliamentarians and 60 outside the