back through history and allow our thoughts to run down the
highway of the ages, we perceive the effects such struggles have had
upon the Jew. We think of the time when ancient Babylonia stretched
out its arm from the East to gain a foothold on the Mediterranean and
to grasp the power of the world. What was the effect upon the Jews?
The Babylonian captivity. Many hundreds of years after, Rome--the
Babylonia of the West--lunged out toward the East in the same search
for universal dominion; and we still observe the Ninth of Ab in
commemoration of the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem. Again
some centuries passed us by, and we come to the inevitable conflict
between Christianity and the rising power of Islam. Who was it but our
own Jews who suffered most as the crusading hordes moved through
Europe--our own Jews who were driven before them from the Rhine into
what at a later time became the great national Ghetto in Poland? And
now in this twentieth century, as a people, and in proportion to its
numbers, which body of men, women and children is paying the most
exacting toll to the forces of destiny? Again it is the Jew.

_"The Belgians of All History"_

We all have the greatest possible sympathy for the Belgian people and
for the Belgian land. Yet how much greater has been the suffering of
the Jewish people--the Belgians not of a day but of all history? In
Eastern Europe, in Poland, in Galicia and in parts of Russia, at least
two or three millions of Jews have suffered from the ravages of a war
waged with a bitterness that exceeds all bounds. Invading armies have
passed and re-passed over their homes--miserable as they were even in
times of peace. False accusations have been launched against them so
that they have been regarded as enemies by both sides and treated as
such. Thousands have been driven from their homes to congest villages
already filled to overflowing or to increase the want and suffering
indigenous to towns and cities. An amount of anguish and pain has been
caused such as the Jews have never known in all their long tramp
through the ages. What have we done, we Jews in America, to assuage
even a part of this pain? What measures have we in view, when once the
war shall be over, to regain for these people the possibility of
living, to bring back for them a little of that which they have lost
through no fault of their own and in no cause which is theirs? In
most cases the only right permitted to them is t