world is now involved in a life or death struggle for righteousness. This is the justification for all the sufferings and all the sacrifices. If this war were not a war of principles and for ideals it would be nothing, and could result in nothing except the further enthronement of the doctrine and worship of force, and the perpetuation of the untold misery and degradation which that form of religion carries with it. It should never be forgotten that this was a war for liberty of the peoples, and in particular of the small peoples. This great war has aggravated and made terribly clear the position of Jewry and the tragic problem of its existence as a small and oppressed nationality. The war has turned numerous _Ghetti_ of Galicia, Bukovina, Russian Poland, Lithuania, Courland and Roumania into heaps of ashes, and hell would be pleasant compared with the situation of great masses of the Jewish people. In this war, particularly in Eastern Europe, hundreds of thousands of Jews were fighting against one another in the hostile camps of the belligerent countries; and the significant factor is that they were not fighting because they were forced to, but from a sense of supreme duty. Even among those that were fighting in the Russian Army before the Revolution, there were many who were not acting under compulsion: they were giving of their best and from their heart. They wanted to take their places in the virile, the over-virile world――which is also their world, they wanted to live and die taking their place in the great living society which called to them. The spirit of Europe――rather the spirit of present-day Europe, which was the spirit of obstinate conflicts and of extreme courage of devotion――has seized the Jews also: they also have entered into this tremendous catastrophe, into this pilgrimage through chaos towards a new world. But for the Jews this war meant infinitely worse evil and greater danger; the nations were divided one from another, Jewry was divided against itself; each nation opposed its fixed shape and character, untouched even by defeat, to the overflooding chaos, but the Jewish nationality seemed to be its victim, in its own wavering and chaotic form of the Diaspora. It almost seemed as though there existed Jews, and divided Jews, but no Jewry. And yet it was not really so. It was a dark time, and the storm was ghastly enough, but the lightning has revealed things that might otherwise have remained hidden. Rather should we believe that the time of the greatest trial for Jewry denoted a high self-recollection, and with it the commencement of a true gathering and union. In times of great stress men discover their own deeper selves. Great trouble somehow digs into the very foundation of a man’s existence, and he cannot explore there without finding what is most essential in him. When some tremendous trouble sends its plough through his heart of hearts, then he becomes aware of wonderful things he has never suspected before.