The Jews in the Eastern War Zone

by American Jewish Committee

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....

It is a boundless sea of troubles that has to be coped with and the full weight of the task is falling upon Jewish shoulders. The gulf dividing the bulk of Russian society from Jewish life and needs and sorrows has not been bridged over by the horrors of war. Though now and again a voice of sympathy is heard from Russian quarters, here and there a Russian hand is extended to feed a starving Jewish child, both moral and material assistance offered by non-Jews to our stricken people is but infinitesimal as compared with the magnitude of the distress.

Nor do we now wish to dwell specifically on Polish-Jewish relations, it being too well known to what extent they have become pointed during the recent months, bearing in their train infinite, yea, unbearable sufferings for our Jewish brethren.

In order to unite the efforts of Jewish society towards the relief of the Jewish sufferers from the war, at the very outbreak of the European conflagration there was formed at Petrograd a General Jewish Relief Committee, with the sanction of the Russian authorities, to act as a center for the collection and distribution of funds to the destitute and needy Jews. At the very beginning of its activity the General Committee issued an appeal to the Jewish public calling it to its duty to the unfortunate sufferers, just as the Jewish soldiers fighting and distinguishing themselves in the ranks of the Russian army are doing their duty by their mother country.

Jewish society at large has shown its usual responsiveness and material support has been forthcoming in as large a measure as individual means and circumstances would permit.

Committees, similar to the General Committee, working on the same lines and in close unity with it have since been organized in prominent centers of the stricken area and outside of it—e. g., in Warsaw, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov, and in addition the existing Jewish organizations, such as the Central Committee of the Jewish Colonization Association, the Society for the Promotion of Education in Russia, the Jewish Health Society, the Society for the Promotion of Trade and Industry among Russian Jews, etc., etc., are taking active part in the relief work. Representatives of the various committees and societies working in the war zone and outside it meet periodically in order to discuss new measures and schemes for the alleviation of the terrible distress.

The conditions and extent of distress in towns, townlets and villages of Poland and of the Pale are being ascertained through delegates of the General Relief Committee working actively and energetically towards the organization of various forms of relief in the several districts. In a number of places the local Jewish community has readily joined in the relief work, doing its utmost to meet the demand for food, shelter, clothing; the local philanthropic and communal Jewish institutions thus becoming valuable agencies of the General Relief Committee. On the whole, however—particularly as far as Poland is concerned:—the organization of assistance to the war sufferers is meeting with endless difficulties, due largely to the fact that the suffering population is in such a state of frantic terror, that many Jews do not even dream of applying to anyone for assistance. In many instances the first terror has given way to complete apathy.

Often our representatives have to seek these people out in their hiding places, to rouse them from their lethargy, to exercise moral pressure on the more prominent members of the community, before anything can be done for the sufferers. This attitude of the people becomes intelligible when we consider the conditions that they live in under ordinary circumstances—their poverty, their lack of education, the contempt they are accustomed to meet with on the part of the non-Jewish population.