The Waterbury Democrat., 1936-10-07

The Near East Industries, which Is holding its sale at the home of Mrs. Irving Chase tomorrow, is one of some twenty educational and vo- cational projects maintained by the Near East Foundation in Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Syria and Pales- tine. The Industries furnish em- ployment to refugee women in Athens and. according to the annual report of the Foundation just received, lis giving 8 great impetus to the raw silk industry in Greece. It is self supporting and non-profit making and serves as an excellent medium of introducing the whole founda- tion program to the general public. The branch in New York, besides running a self-supporting shop, is doing 2. great deal of work among organized clubs who are sponsoring parts of individual projects in the Foundation program"
 The Industries were started by American relief workers at the time when hundreds of thousands ot refugees were pouring from the in terior of Asia Minor in 1920 to 1923, and when more than 132,000 'or- pflaned children were taken into orphanages. The objectives of the Industries were two-fold; one was to try to preserve the lovely native home arts of the women which it was feared would be lost during the wholesale migrations and the long years spent in refugee camps; the other was to give employment to widowed members with dependent children so that they could main- tain homes of some sort wherever they were exiled and so keep their children out of the over-crowded orphanages. Two thousand women have been thus employed and as they averaged four dependents each, 10000 persons have been supported by the Near East Industries.
 Today most of the work is done in Greece, which country accepted a million and a quarter refugees at the time of the evacuation of the Christian minorities from Asia Minor. The great variety in the designs used in the work is ac- counted for by the fact that the women came from so many different localities and naturally the motifs traditional to their many villages are used. Also the museums of Greece have furnished the original designs for much of the work. Many places of historic interest are rep resented - Rhodes, Crete, Parnas- sus, Macedonia, and many of the designs have interesting historical significance. There is one beauti-. full panel of raw silk embroidered identicall with famous Greek altar cloth. In it are embodied symbols of the age of Pericles, 5the century, B. C., namely, the peacock; the double eagle, which is the emblem of the first Byzantine empire; the plantain (tree of life) and the cy-. press (tree of immortality, symbols of the Mohammedan era, 5th cent ury. A. D.; the amphora, which was tho ceremonial urn of the classical period; the birds of the Aegean and Adriatic Seas, representing the Kingdom of the Greek Islands; and the cross of the Fourth Crusade, 1Ith century, symbolizing the re- turn of Christianity to southern Europe. The original of this panel is in the National Museum 1n Athens.
 There is an interesting little story in connection with this panel which has just been received by Miss Rose Ewald, director of the Near East shop in New York, from Mrs. H. A. Hill, daughter of Professor Edward Capps of Princeton, who is in charge