First were smitten the Jews of Russia, then forming the largest
single concentration of Jewry. Until the outbreak of the first
World War, they numbered some five million souls, source and
focus of Jewish survival. There, despite the restrictions and op-pressions of Czarist Governments, an independent Jewish being
was most securely preserved. There the new Hebrew literature
flourished which gave us poets, novelists, thinkers, leaders--those
who in the last century revived the cultural and intellectual life
of the entire Diaspora. There, too, flourished the modern Yiddish
writing which played no unimportant part in the lives of the
Jewish masses in Europe and America up to the onset of the
second World War. Thence sprang Haskalah and Chibbath Zion,
Jewish Renaissance and the Love of Zion, which burst out of the
confines of the Ghetto, to give the folk a modern philosophy and
strengthen its immemorial hope of national revival. There the
Jewish workers' movement blossomed, to open new horizons and
cut new courses for the poor and youthful of a people athirst
for freedom and redemption. To crown all, Russian Jewry was the
dwelling-place of the strength and greatness of Zionism, which
in a jubilee of years has magically altered the lineaments of the
Jewish people and its status on earth.

That main body and chiefest core of Jewry the Bolshevist dis-figured in furious haste. It was sundered from all other Jews; the
Zionist Movement was outlawed, its leaders were thrown into
jail or consigned to Siberian doom. The teaching of Hebrew was
proscribed and Hebrew literature suppressed, and eventually
even the Yiddish schools were disbanded. Thus was cruel discrim-ination visited upon the Jewish people, alone among the many
races and tribes of Russia: forbidden to develop a national
culture and, unkindest cut of all, denied all contact with the
Land of Israel; for Russian Jews the way out to the National
Home was impenetrably barred.

Surely there could be no greater calamity! But we were to
know one infinitely more horrible in the second World War. The
Nazi Fuehrer in his black mind resolved utterly to obliterate the