[¹] Société Nationale Universelle pour la Renouvellement de l’Orient [Henri Dunant] Paris ... 1866.
LXIX.
An Appeal of Rabbi Elias Gutmacher and Rabbi Hirsch Kalischer to the Jews of England (1867)
Appeal to Our Brethren
Thou shalt yet plant vines upon the mountains of Samaria; the planters shall plant and shall eat them as common things. Jeremiah, chap. xxxi.
And I will raise up for them a plant of renown and they shall be no more consumed with hunger in the land. Ezekiel xxxiv.
Hear ye generous people, learn ye who take an interest in holy matters, show your tender feelings towards our brethren in the holy land! Think of the abandoned, devastated, sacred soil. Thus voices and signs urgently warn you, pointing out to you that the time long ago vouchsafed has arrived to render them effectual help.
Destructive epidemic diseases and famine ravage in that land in the same awful way this year as they did in the past one and your ever so abundantly flowing gifts and donations are not efficient to alleviate the misery, to satiate the hunger; upon us the needy cast their looks and crave for relief. But there is only one way, one remedy to prevent a recurrence of such distress, and that is: colonization, cultivation and improvements of the Palestine soil.
This proposal, suggested already many years ago, urges now more than ever upon final realization, the soil must be redeemed. The society, “Alliance Israélite,” in Paris, so great in its activity, at the head of which M. Adolphe Crémieux stands as president, has declared itself in favor of this idea and promised its own assistance and interference (sic) elsewhere, to accomplish the object, as we have seen from that society’s recently published half-yearly report.