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No. 27. Vienna, 4 July 1902. 6th Year

A Limited Partnership for the Establishment of Jewish Welfare Institutions.

By Alfred Weissberger.

In pursuance of a suggestion made at the Bielitz Party Conference, a preparatory committee for the establishment of this society has been formed in Vienna.

With this we should once more have reached a stage at which experiments and beginnings, ideas and suggestions, turn into earnest work; Jewish intellect and Jewish capital are to be concentrated in order to further the economic and cultural elevation of our paupers; this concentration is to make it possible to create institutions which bear the character of relief undertakings on a grand scale and which are nevertheless founded not upon the principle of one-sided giving or receiving, but set services against demands in due measure, whereby giver and receiver are brought into a more dignified relation.

In the national houses of the Germans and Czechs, in the institutes of the English trade unions, in the students' hostels and workhouses of Brussels, Paris, etc., we find our views realised wholly or in part, and the elements of our endeavour raised to accomplished fact.

With us, however, these elements find a further complement in the abnormal complication and intensity of economic need, which has shown beginnings of self-help in every field, whose successful development is probable given some support. Thus attempts were made to found schools for artisans, schools for domestic servants, cookery and needlework schools; people's kitchens and free-table societies were set up, all this with the greatest material and personal sacrifices and mostly with quite slight and transitory success. Through the interlocking, combination and co-operation of the institutions named, it is possible to reduce their working expenses to a minimum and to make the advantages and merits of the one serviceable to the others as well.

Existing premises could serve various purposes; the personal activity of individual self-sacrificing and capable persons would find a rich and rewarding field of labour, without necessitating a dispersal and useless exhaustion of the best forces. A systematic charity, which does not exhaust itself in mere alms-giving, would not paralyse the strength and the morals of the people, but would further the social and ethical recovery of the Jewish masses.

Therefore a concentration of the numerous welfare institutions and endeavours has become urgently necessary for us Jews.

In all great cities, and above all among all oppressed nations, we find considerable associations of capital for the erection of hospitals, asylums and homes, for the creation of opportunities for work, etc.; among all nations the rich know that the repute of and respect for their possessions depend upon how much they have contributed to raising the welfare of the people and to relieving its distress; in our ranks, too, men will not in the long run be able to close their minds to this recognition, the more so as the sacrifices which the charity now customary demands of every individual well-to-do Jew are certainly considerably greater than would be the case with a somewhat more orderly and centralised charity.

The society will by degrees have to concern itself with the whole complex of questions belonging to the sphere of poor relief and social welfare; in doing so, however, it will alter the system hitherto customary, by transforming alms-giving into a granting of loans, into a procuring of opportunities for work, into an increase of the knowledge and abilities necessary in the struggle for existence; thereby living values will be produced, which make it possible for the capital expended to be gradually amortised again and to bear interest, and for the society, which must have very considerable means at its disposal, to be founded on a commercial basis. This must not be misunderstood or misinterpreted. The self-evident ethical principle that no profit may be drawn from the straits of the needy will always remain an inviolable tenet of our morality.

The profit of the society is to be founded — as already indicated — upon a rational use of space, a skilful division of labour and the utilisation of idle labour-power. However insignificant these means of making capital fruitful may appear,