Worcester Democrat and the ledger-enterprise. (Pocomoke City, Md.) 1921-1953, 1926-05-22
JEWS OF RUSSIA IN
PiTIABLE CONDITION
Ruined and Starving, Re-
ports Investigator.

New YOrk.-The wracking expert
ence of three-mOnths' nightmare"
journey through gray. huddled TWEEN
tieth-century inferno of misery, want
and helplessness was recounted by
returned on the steamship Paris d.
rect from a tour of the hunger re-
giOn" Of Poland, Galicia and Bessara-
bia. where hundreds of thousands of
Jewish families, after ten-years'
struggle against the impoverishment
Of the war, are now crushed In final
tragedy of Industrial ruin, restitution
and starvation as a result of the latest
economic collapse in eastern Europe.
Miss May, whe was abroad on a visit
when the first reports of the new
Jewish disaster in Europe reached this
country, was commissioned by cable
by David A. Brown, national chairman
of the United Jewish campaign for
| $15,OO0,OO0 overseas chest to complete
the reconstruction tasks undertaken by
the American Jewish joint distribution
committee in Russia and the eastern
European countries, to obtain first
hand information of actual conditions
and the extent of the breakdown of
trade and industry affecting the Jews
Of these countries.
Inquiry Begun In January.
She started on her mission early in
January and in the last three months
has journeyed from city to city, from
village to village in all the large Jew
ish sections Of Poland, Galicia and Bes-
sarabia.
Her reports by radio and letter to
Mr.. Brown. based on authenticated
statistical information, make up a
day-by-day chronicle Of human ruin
and despair, crowded with intimate
detail of the suffering of workers
broken by months and years of unem-
ployment. of MERCHANTS stripped of
their last resources, of proud and
poor alike leveled to bread-lines and
soup-kitchens, of women and children
starving and freezing and waiting in
piteous resignation for death.
More than a million Jews Of Poland
-one-third the entire Jewish pOpula-
ton Of the country-are at present alb
solutely without any means Of sup
port, and their only hope of being
saved from extinction, Miss May de-
clares, rests on the early arrival of
relief funds from America.
The Jewish cities of Bessarabia,
Miss May found, present repetition
of the Polish picture of impoverish-
ment, stagnation and helpless misery.
Due to a two years crop failure, the
historic Jewish agricultural commu-
mites Of this region are shattered by
want, famine and disease.
Child mortality in Bessarabia has
reached 100 per cent as a result Of
severe malnutrition and lack of med
ical aid, and favus and hunger-typhus
are spreading ominously. The food
allowance of Jewish families in this
section of Bessarabia-an available
food supplies are rationed by local
hunger cOmmittees"-is few ounces
Of corn meal and fraction Of a pound
Of potatoes a day.
FrenzIed Struggle for Bread.
Miss Mays final experiences in .Po-
land represent peak Of the appall-
ing panorama Of physical and moral
breakdown in which a piteous, frenzied
struggle for bread, hopeless submission
to squalor and disease, and a panic
of self-destruction as an escape from
unbearable suffering and degradation
bespeak the utter collapse of the an
cient communal structure of Jewish
life in Poland, and threaten the ex-
tinction of millions of lives of men,
women and children.
In Brest-Litovsk Miss May found the
poorest Of the poor. mostly war wild
ows, still living in the ruins of the
synagogues in which they took shell
ter when they returned as refugees
and eXiles of siege and evacuation
after the razing of the city in the last
withdrawal Of the Russian armies from
the fortress.
Utterly depleted by the destruction
Of the military occupations and coun-
ter-Occupations, scarcity of work and
food and the struggle against broken
down, rudimentary living conditions,
the local community is incapable of re-
lieving the plight Of these people.
War orphans and children born in
the years of famine and internal tur-
moil are growing up as waits, with
weakened constitutions and no out
look for a normal adjustment to or
derly productive life.