English Translation

Aom Saurbi: 13 T CZECH EMIGRATION AND WORLD JUDENTUM ls the former Czecho-Slovak Senator Vojta Beneš landed on the morning of September 26, 1938 from the Polish ship "Pilsudski" in New York, his home was in the most severe state crisis. He had travelled to the United States on behalf of the National Council in Prague, in order to create sympathy for the Czecho-Slovakia in the country familiar to him from his twenty-year-old war work in the USA through lectures. A few days later, as a result of the Munich agreement, the old borders of the Republic fell, he threw his previous intentions overboard and began his political and conspiratorial activity as before. This was the birth of the new Czech emigration work. At her cradle was a statement by Vojta Beneš, which was published on November 1, 1938 in the New York Times. The reports of the growing tide of anti-Semitism in Czech Slovakia were denied yesterday by Vojta Beneš, the older brother of the former president of Czecho-Slovakia, with the assurance that it is not possible to transform a nation like Czechoslovakia from a model democratic republic into a fascist, anti-Semitic people only by a stroke of a feather. The former Czech-Slovak senator, here as an inde pendent delegate of good will, makes this statement in a telegram sent from Chicago to the closing session of the American-Jewish Congress at the Hotel Biltmore. Delegates of the three-day meeting, having heard the reports on the development of intensive propaganda and a growing economic suspicion of the Jews in the United States, decided to establish a committee to combat such propaganda and slander. Beneš asked the American Jews to take a calm and sympathetic attitude and to maintain understanding of the sufferings of the Czech people and to be sure that most of the developments of the last four weeks have been the result of violence and coercion'. He urged the Jews and the Czechs and all the democratic peoples who love freedom to be united by the joint bond of friendship and understanding." In the aftermath, Vojta Beneš also sent to other Jewish clubs in the USA the invitation to support the Czecho-Slovak cause. A little later, in London, Jan Masaryk, the then Czecho-Slovak Ge- sent to the United States to do political business with his father's name introduced there, and demanded in lectures to support the Jewish refugees. January 1939, Masaryks had a "heartful debate" with President Roosevelt, who apparently served the same aims. But it was not until March 15, 1939 that the pro-Jewish agitation of the Czech emigrants began to run unmasked on full tours. From Toulouse, Paris and Daventry, from London, New York and Jerusalem and finally from Moscow, a propaganda for Jewish world interests was launched in Czech broadcasts, which in their urgency only too clearly betrayed their financial backers. The measures taken against Judaism in Bohemia and Moravia soon after the establishment of the Protectorate were precisely recorded and accompanied by mourning songs, in which it was assured to the hostile foreign country that the Czech people of the homeland had "nothing in common with the fight against democracy and the persecution of the Jews."