Diplomats -- United States -- Biography; Morgenthau, Henry, 1856-1946; United States -- Foreign relations -- 20th century
Askenazy is another personage of those days whom I shall long remember.
One of the great scholars of Lemberg University, he was known as the
foremost historian of Central Europe; since then he has become a
familiar international figure as Poland’s representative at the Geneva
meetings of the League of Nations. An occasional attendant at the
Synagogue, he was nevertheless a pronounced Assimilator and enormously
proud of the fact that his family have lived in Poland since 1650.
Askenazy saw small benefit to anybody in the alleged privileges of
educational separation granted the Polish Jews by the Treaty.
“If the Jews have their own schools,” he said, “that will only widen the
difference between them and the Poles.”
I reminded him that the separation extended merely to the primary
schools.
“It will be gradually applied to the high schools,” he insisted, “and
then to the universities. In their primary schools, the Jewish children
will of course be taught Hebrew or Yiddish; that will make it next to
impossible for them to mix with the pupils of the higher grades when
they get there.”
Very impressive was our visit to the chief synagogue of Warsaw. There
must have been 25,000 people present. Outside the building, those
clamouring for entrance literally jammed the square, and the streets for
several blocks surrounding it, from house wall to house wall; inside,
the crowd was so dense that every man’s shoulder overlapped his
neighbour’s. The cries from the street made it imperative for us to show
ourselves there, after the services, when we were almost mobbed. Some of
the crowd wanted to pull our automobile to our home; others clamoured to
carry us there on their shoulders, and something close to good-natured
force had to be used to enable us to reach our car. Rubenstein came from
Vilna for the meeting; there was a delegation from Posen; and Dr. Thon
represented the Jews of the Parliament. An eminent nerve specialist from
Posen, in his speech, stated that the nervous condition of the Jews
should be attributed to “Halleritis”--a fear of what the Polish Army
under General Haller might next do to them; while Poznansky, the Rabbi,
in his address, laid stress on the Jews’ desire to be first class, and
not second class, Polish citizens.
This is not the place to recapitulate all the details of our journey
through Poland. In Vilna, where our calendar was overcrowded, we got
through a really incredible amount of work, by running three tribunals,
each with an investigator, interpreter, and stenographer. The accounts
of the evidence--of the testimony concerning the outrages to which the
Jews had undoubtedly been subjected--all the world has long since read.
I shall touch only on three incidents: those at Stanislawa, Pinsk, and
Vilna.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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