ednesday, March 31, 1937
JEWISH WESTERN BULLETIN
7
To its many Jewish friends ...
The BAIT
Extends Sincere Greetings and Best Wishes for a Joyous
Passover
Victoria - British Columbia
Newspaper men with the Spanish [Fascist rebels report that many of the old Catholic monastaries are ver-iitable treasure houses of Hebrew in-Icunabula.
GREAT MEN
(Continued from Page 3)
even a part of the books and essays published by Dr. Landau in a lifetime dedicated to arduous study. We cannot deal here in detail even with the two volumes of lectures, sermons and essays just recently published in English under the titles: "Judaism, ancient and modern", and "Judaism in Life and Literature".
No matter how much Professor Landau has written, I feel that writing with him is only a side-line. He is mainly a student. He is a passionate lover of literature in all its branches. And that is why he would not concentrate on one subject.
He is an Epicure, a gourmet in the field of letters. If one may use these terms in a sublimated sphere. He has a refined sense for all that is true and beautiful in world-writings. Nothing truly human is alien to him. As a bee he is attracted to every flower delightful to the eye or intoxicating by the scent. The honey comes only Incidentally as a by-product. In a world of specialized scholarship and professional writing, such a Platonic lover with such universal sympathies is a rarety indeed.
Our best wishes go out to our South African brethren, may they enjoy for many long years the active leadership of this most eminent representative of what is best In the Rabbinate. And they who did and do so much contribute financially towards the needs of world-Jewry, may they for many long years enjoy also the pride that their spiritual head is also one of the outstanding contributors to Jewish letters and scholarship.
And here are a few sentences from one of the sermons of Dr. Landau on
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Rosh-Hashonah. It is a sermon dealing with "a problem which has deeply stirred the mind of the Jewish community of South Africa, which has occupied the attention of the Beth-Din and of the earnest public workers for two decades. It is the problem of Proselytism."
Let us just hear how the Rabbi states the problem and it will not be too difficult for us to arrive at a proper answer omrselves:
"Every member of this community, who is not altogether indifferent to the daily events of our commimal life, must have been forcibly struck by the ever-increasing number of Christian young men and women who have sought admission to our faith. If all those non-Jews and non-Jowesses had been infiuenced only by religious convictions; if they had approached us with purely moral motives; if their change of faith had been dictated by feelings which emanate from a religious source, and make such a change imperative— there would have been no question as to the attitude we ought to adopt towards them. The Jewish law on that point is so clear and precise as to exclude any wilfully wrong interpretation. But, alas! in the tens of cases that have come to my knowledge, it has almost without exception been my painful experience that not religious fervoiu:, but religious indifference, has been the real cause of such a desire. 'The son of Hagar is mocking.' The change of faith is a mere farce, the travesty of a religious confession, enacted to achieve another purpose. The Synagogue is used as a mere stepping-stone, and the knowledge of this distressing fact has divided the community into two camps. The one demands the admission of those would-be proselytes though suspect of insincerity; the other demands absolute rejection, regardless of any extenuating circumstances. Both sections are actuated by one and the same reason: the salvation of their children. 'Admit the stranger,' pleads the one, 'in order to save my child.' 'Reject the stranger,' insists the other, 'that the bad ex-
ample may not affect my child.' "Which course should the Rabbi, should the commimity adopt?"
"FEELS DESERTED"
DR. STEPHEN S. WISE
A Great Restorer
Dr. B. M. Levin of Jerusalem is neither Rabbi nor Professor. He has declined for years to accept whatever position that would claim even part of his time.
His life he dedicated to one single purpose. And it is a piuTpose which was hard to believe that one lifetime would suffice for its accomplishment. But now it seems that God willing, he is actually going to do it with many y^ars to spare for revision and adornment.
Five hundred years in the history of Jewish literary creativeness were a blank. The Gaonic period, from the completion of the Talmud until the dawn of Jewish scholarship in Spain, was always considered one of the most brilliant epochs in our spiritual | history. We knew that all our great' European scholars were chiefly only, successors and heirs of the Babylonian Gaonim.
But the Gaonic literature itself in
its original writings was almost completely lost. Whatever was spared by time, was scattered in thousands of quotations in hundreds of out-of-print books, in thousands of time-V'Om and worm-eaten manuscripts and in sheets whose script is no more legible. And all this hidden away in libraries and public as well as private collections all over the world.
And there came a man with no means whatsoever, with no support from any quarters, with the backing 01" no institution, and resolved that he, single-handedly, is going to restore to the Jewish people this great loss. And while giving it back, he is not going to give it in that state of neglect and shattered ruins in which it has fallen during a thousand and more years, but he will restore it to lis ancient glory, make it presentable and ready for use and then present it to the people as a gift everlasting.
It looked fantastic, to be sure. But cut of the planned twenty volumes, I have already seven magnificent volumes on my shelves. Since long I am convinced that he has a kind of a sixth sense to decipher, make sense of, piece together, and guess the authorship, of any shredded scrap of paper centuries old. But how he manages to get the means necessary for his work and for publication Is still a mystery to me.
Once upon a time he taught school in Haifa. / nd from his meagre means he acquired a handrpress. When he had no money for the printer he used
to set the type and print himself. Is he stiU'doing it?
Beside the seven volumes of his main work, he has at least another dozen of publications pertaining to the Gaonic period. And all was achieved in face of all the odds in the world by sheer tenacity of purpose and Indomitable will.
After all, the generation in which we live has some men we can justly be proud of.
Wishing all our Jewish Friends in Victoria A Very Happy Passover
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To our many Jewish iriends and readers
we wish A Happy and Prosperous Passover
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BRITISH COLUMBIA
Fuehrer, Fanatic, Faker and Flunkey
By FIEBBS VAN PAASSE3N
Piorellb La Guardia's picturesque remarks on the subject of Adolf Hitler before a convention of the American Jewish Congress Women, have produced quite a rumpus But in all the commentaries I have read it seems to me that the Mayor's essential point was altogether overlooked. La Guardia was not merely wise-cracking or throwing pithy epithets around. He sounded a grave warning by pointing his finger directly at the Reichsfuehrer. The Mayor did not merely call Hitler "a brown-shirted fanatic," but "a brown-shirted fanatic who is menacing the peace of the world." Hitler the war-monger, Hitler the flunkey of Krupp and Rhien-metal and the Farben Trust, who is throttling the spirit of freedom in the great German people in order that it may beconie a willing instrument in his hands for the calamity immeasurable, the greatest blood-bath of history, which he plans—that is the Hitler whom New York's Mayor threw into the limelight. With this La Guardia rendered a service to civilization and to the cause of peace and democracy.
The moment was well-chosen, for within recent weeks, on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the Nazi regime's coming to power, more eulogies and paens of praise in honor of the brown-shirt government have been uttered and published in this country than anywhere else in the world except in the Reich itself. Again and again, it is reiterated in our semi-Fascist press that Hitler has succeeded in transforming a sordidly humiliated people into a first-class power, a Reich that is making its voice heard in the world and which is even imposing its will upon other States. Hitler's Germany is being held up as a model of order and tranquillity. No sit-down strikes in Naziland, no social unrest in Adolf's paradise.
And what—so it is argued—if this wonderous achievement involved a little hardship for a handful of Jews and liberals? Wasn't it worth it? Did the Fuehrer not lead Germany from the depths to the heights? These are the questions posed before the American public by the Reich's open and clandestine propagandists.
And then it is pointed out that if Hitler achieved what he did achieve it was because he first solved the Jewish question; that is to say, put the Jew in his place by removing him from the position of superiority or alleged superiority which he once occupied in the cultural and commercial life of Germany.
Millions—not only in Poland and Roumania, or Holland and Belgium, but here in America—hear this sort of argument and are impressed with it. It sticks with them. And in this, way the scapegoat, the victim, is clearly indicated to the uncritical mind of the petty American middle class for any eventual and quite possible national crisis or depression.
Hitler, who poses as the savior of Europe from "Judeo-Bolshevism," is in reality the temporary savior of the German munitions trusts, who without him would have been bankrupt by now. His anti-Jewish ideology is a fake. Real are the inestimable services he rendered to the merchants of death. He is their flunkey, their tool, their instrument to prolong the flow of dividends. He is also their hope for an expanded market in the Ukraine and other Soviet republics. The anti-Jewish fanaticism is a stall and a mask. His real job is to plunge Europe—and America—into war. That is why he was put in povver by the munitioneers.
—Copyright, 1937, SAFS.
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PASSOVER GREETINGS TO OUR MANY JEWISH FRIENDS and READERS
Victoria Times
VICTORIA
BRITISH COLT
The Province of
Britisli Columbia
extends warm Greetings to its Jewish citizens on the eve of their solemn Feast of the Passover, and cordial good wishes for their continued peace and prosperity.
BUREAU OF
Provincial Information
VICTORIA, B.C.