While numerous towns and townlets have, in generous hospitality, opened their gates to the unfortunate refugees and exiles from the war area, the native Jewish population of these places is itself suffering a severe economic crisis, an acute attack of unemployment, which as a matter of fact, is further intensified by the influx of refugees eager to offer their services, for the smallest remuneration. Thus poverty and misery are growing in these places too, the burden of relief becoming too heavy for the local community to bear. We have already stated that the industrial life of Poland and in a large part of the Pale has been laid waste as a consequence of the war. Hundreds of factories have been destroyed, hundreds others have had to stop work for want of capital, raw material, fuel and—first and foremost—for want of a market for their articles of production. Many thousands of workmen who were formerly employed by these factories have remained without bread. Whole branches of trade have been shattered, burying the welfare of the artisans under their ruins. The tailors, weavers, bootmakers, builders, trades, normally sustaining a large percentage of Jews in Poland and in the Pale, are dead; the artisans are left to starve, unless something can be done to save them. Commercial life also has been laid waste. The merchants—great and small—are ruined; hundreds of merchant’s clerks are thrown out of work and have to apply to public charity. There is yet another class of sufferers whose wants and needs have to be attended to. About 300,000 Jews are fighting in the ranks of the Russian army. Their mothers, wives and children are receiving but scanty support (about 2 roubles a head) from the Government. About half of them, however, are not getting any Government aid at all, their marriages, although legally solemnized, not having been entered in the official marriage registers. (It is a well known fact that the uneducated Jews of Poland and in the Pale frequently omit to have their marriages registered, failing to realize the full importance of this formality.) Rent and food having become considerably dearer with the outbreak of the war, the soldiers’ families often suffer acute want, which necessitates immediate help lest these people become charges on their community. Many of the soldiers will never return from the battlefields; others will come back as cripples, unfit to support themselves or their families. They will all want support of some kind or another....