THE CALL IN LADINO
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.
The present westward migration of the Spanish Jew had less to offer than their migration eastward five hundred years ago. In New York their isolation has been complete, for the Yiddish speaking East Side Jew does not understand them any better than does the American, and rather despises their lack of intellectual attainments.