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No. 47. Vienna, 21 November 1902 — 21 Marcheshvan 5663. 6th Year

The Elections to the Vienna Jewish Community.

On Sunday the 23rd inst. the elections to the Board of the Jewish Community take place in Vienna. For our great movement it is a question of a purely local nature; but for the Zionists of Vienna it is of importance, for their concern is once again to make a breach in the antiquated system that reigns in this body. It is the system that we combat, and not the persons. Some of those who sit in the Community council-room may not be so old, but their spirit is senile and their doings are antiquated. In these days it must be clear even to the less far-sighted that the consolations and the prospects of an early improvement in the situation of the Jews in Austria and in Vienna are nothing but empty talk, without any foundation or justification. On the contrary, matters grow worse and worse, and the only representation the Jews in Vienna possess is the Community Board, and the only prospect of help that offers itself to them is that of self-help, of the gathering and concentration of all their forces. More dangerous than the enemy without is the enemy within — indifferentism and apostasy. From day to day the movement of defection grows — and what does the Community do to oppose it? It has not even the courage to name openly those who desert the colours and wish to know nothing more of Judaism.

In the Community council-room sit people who feel themselves Jews for just so long as they sit within it, but who make the very least use of that feeling the moment they leave the council-room. Is it not an incredible fact that a member of the Community Board should thwart the awarding of work to Jewish tradesmen on the ground that this would give offence to our adversaries; that a Community official, who in a new building he erected employed almost no Jewish tradesmen at all, should think to excuse himself by flinging in their faces the unjustified and unheard-of reproach that they must still go to school to the Christian tradesmen — a thing which not even the Antisemites assert, and which they have to-day triumphantly recorded in their organs? All this could come about because all these gentlemen are not conscious of the greatness of their task and of their responsibility.

Our adversaries call our final aim a Utopia, because they cannot grasp and comprehend it. The striving for freedom and human dignity, for the possibility of life for our enslaved brethren — a Utopia! Far more utopian is it to hope and to wait until the rest of mankind, which in its overwhelming majority is not well disposed towards the Jews, shall change its mind and be converted to pure love and brotherhood.

Though they no longer dare to oppose the victorious idea of Zionism openly to-day, they stand towards it as indifferently as if it did not concern them in the least, as if they had some other and better expedient with which to meet the material and moral distress of Jewry. To our broadly conceived social-political programme they know nothing better to oppose than to call it likewise a Utopia, whose execution would require millions, whereby the taxpayers would only be heavily burdened. That is a ridiculous and untrue assertion.

To be sure, the Community administration has trouble in these days in collecting the taxes from those who are attached to Judaism only loosely and unwillingly, and who evade their just and due assessment by threatening otherwise to leave Judaism altogether. But when our spirit has come to prevail, and the insight has taken hold that the individual has not only burdens and duties to bear for the whole, but also something to expect from it; when a Jewish public spirit such as we conceive it, and have created among our adherents, shall have taken hold in this Community also, then every man will bring willingly and with a glad heart the mite that falls to him in right and equity towards the Community's expenses. By the co-operation of all, moreover, institutions can be created without any greater demand upon the individual — institutions which would benefit in particular those circles of our people which are otherwise ground to pulp under the pressure of circumstances.