According to the statistics compiled by the Palestina Amt and embodied in a separate report, some 8,000 Jews left the country during the crisis. Of these, 4,000 were from Jaffa, 2,000 from Jerusalem, 1,500 from the Judean colonies and 500 from the colonies in Galilee. The estimated number of Jews at present in Palestine is 88,100, of whom 13,500 are to be found in the colonies.
The requisitions and the war contributions levied upon the Jews during the war, amount to 152,805 francs.
APPENDIX
I.
REPORT OF THE RUSSIAN-JEWISH RELIEF
COMMITTEE
NOTE.—The following report was issued by the (Russian) Jewish Committee for the Relief of Sufferers from the War, to its members in Russia, in May, 1915, since when conditions in Russia and Poland have steadily grown worse. The authoritativeness of the report is guaranteed by the personnel of the committee, numbering among its membership the foremost Jews of Russia, among whom may be named: Baron A. de Gunzberg, H. Sliosberg, M. Ginsburg and B. Kamenka, chairman of the Executive Committee; M. A. Warschavsky, chairman of the Organizing Committee; and D. Feinberg, L. Bramson and M. Kreinin, Secretaries.
Terrible disaster has befallen the Jewish population of the Pale of Settlement and of Poland. Hunger and thirst and disease and death, and moral sufferings beyond the power of human pen to describe are the lot of hundred thousands of Jewish men, women and children whom the war has driven from their homes, whose houses and hearths have been plundered and destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of our unfortunate brethren are staring in hopeless despair into a future that seems to spell nothing but new tears and sufferings....
According to the data collected by the General Polish Relief Committee, in Poland, alone there are at least 200 towns and about 9,000 townlets and villages that have suffered from the war, the material damage amounting to the gigantic figure of over a milliard roubles ($500,000,000). Besides the terrible losses sustained by the rural population, the whole industrial production, amounting to nearly 800 million roubles a year, has been ruined. About three million townspeople are destitute, and of these three million at least half, i. e., 1,500,000, are Jews. To this number of unfortunate victims we have to add the population of the provinces of Kovno and Grodno in the northwestern region of the Pale, the provinces of Bessarabia, Podolia and Volynia in the southern and southwestern regions. These provinces, bordering upon Germany and Austria, have a Jewish population of at least 500,000 people. Thus the total number of Jews that have, in one way or another, suffered immediately from the conditions of warfare equals over two million people, representing one-third, of the total Jewish population of Russia.