The Survey, Volume 30, Number 4, Apr 26, 1913Various
History
The Survey, Volume 30, Number 4, Apr 26, 1913
Various
Charities -- Periodicals; Social problems -- Periodicals; United States -- Social conditions -- Periodicals
ATTENTION BROTHERS AND SISTERS!
It is high time for us to come together and discuss ways and means to
improve our conditions. Most of our people come to this country from
Turkey and the Orient not altogether prepared for the struggle for
existence that awaits them. A good many remain idle, or their work is
intermittent, and others, again, work in surroundings not conducive to
good health, nor is the remuneration sufficient to enable them to earn a
decent livelihood, resulting in time in poverty, and in some cases our
people are obliged to live in congested surroundings with disastrous
effect on their health, and some are becoming tubercular. A good many of
our children do not attend religious school and roam the streets without
having religious training or the ideals of our religion inculcated in
them, which may prove disastrous to Judaism and good citizenship. No
central bureau of information for our people is available when they are
in need of advice of any kind.
Therefore we appeal to you for the sake of yourself, your families and
your children, as well as for the sake of Israel and your country, to
attend a mass meeting which our federation has arranged to be held on
Sunday, March 16, at the University Settlement where leaders of our
community and other prominent men will discuss the issues affecting your
interests.
_Don’t fail to attend_ and urge your friends to do the same.
FEDERATION OF ORIENTAL JEWS OF AMERICA,
Joseph Gedalecia, President. A. J. AMATEAU, Secretary.
These Spanish Jews preserved their standing as merchants, artisans or
even small semi-professionals. In some towns, notably Salonika, they
came to form the bulk of the population. They were seldom persecuted as
they had no suppressed nationalism to defend against an invader. They
never sank to the level of the native peasantry. Though materially
comfortable, their intellectual development stagnated, under Turkish
discouragement of education, until the young Turk movement of a few
years ago. This was accompanied by a spread of popular education and
with it knowledge that there was a world outside their own particular
corner of the Orient. Ambition and a desire to see the world stimulated
an Oriental Jewish migration which is largely responsible for their
presence in New York city. It is almost the only Jewish migration to
America that was not due to poverty or persecution. The Spanish Jews
chose America as their place of pilgrimage in the face of the fact that
the Spanish government has recently sent representatives to Turkey for
the purpose of inducing them to return to Spain, an evidence that that
country believes them to have qualities that would be an asset to the
country of their choice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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