Chapter Three
The First World War Years
As already mentioned in Chapter 2, the economic situation of
Haynt during the First World War was
poor and its political line during the German occupation was unpopular.
Due to the war, rail traffic was limited and insecure,
access to readers was made difficult and it became impossible to get the paper
out to its readers even in nearby communities; a circulation of over 100,000
was reduced almost to the copies sold in Warsaw
alone. In the days after the outbreak of the war, the paper's format was
reduced to two pages, yet its price was increased from two to three kopecks.
There was no advertising and, when it began to appear anew, it was just a
fraction of what Haynt had carried
before the war. Until October 21,
1914, there were no theater notices. In Issue No. 231 of October 22, 1914, we find a notice
that a Russian theater troupe will open at Kaminska's
theater "with patriotic productions. The repertoire will consist
exclusively of plays appropriate to today's times."
On September 18,
1914, Haynt resumed publication
of four pages. The paper was poor in content. The Czarist censor only wanted to
publish official military communiqués and material from official sources, or to
reprint information that had already appeared in other newspapers with the
consent of military censors. It was impossible to write about the persecutions,
pogroms and
massive resettlements that had befallen the Jews in the war zone of
Congress Poland,
particularly in the areas of the highest concentrations of Jewish population.
The Czarist regime was taking out its frustrations on the Jews for the
catastrophic failures on the military front. In Haynt, one could hardly find a hint of any of this. For example,
regarding the expulsion of the Jews of the town of Mogielnica
near Warsaw, Haynt, in Issue No. 105
of May 23, 1915, could only publish a laconic note under the entirely
uninformative title "Jews in Mogielnica":
"As reported by Birzhevya Vedomosti (a liberal daily in St. Petersburg),
“The entire Jewish population was deported from Mogielnica, roughly 5,000 people. They were given a short
period of time in which to liquidate their businesses.”
It was not unusual for the press to be compelled to publish
absurdities. Thus, we read, in an item entitled “An airplane in Warsaw”
in Haynt of June 28, 1915: Warszawskaya
Mysl reports that, last Sunday at 5:00 PM, a German airplane appeared over Warsaw.
It was met with gunfire, in response to which it turned back and disappeared.”
A notice in Haynt from this same
period indicates that, “as Kurier Warszawski reports, it rained yesterday in Warsaw.”
A small indication of the tribulations besetting the Jews
were the lengthy lists of local committees seeking Jews who had “gone missing
on the roads leading away from their homes” and the calls for aid to refugees
and the homeless. The first article that Sh. J.
Yatskan (Polish spelling: Jackan) wrote following the
outbreak of the war was about aid for the Jews of Kalisz.
Soon after the war began, the Germans occupied the city, which lay on the
Russo-German border. Before the Russian military was able to react and drive
them back, the Germans managed to conduct a pogrom and rob many Jews.
Almost three weeks before the Russians evacuated Warsaw,
on July 18, 1915, Haynt, like the other Jewish dailies,
was closed down after publishing its Issue No. 153. Issue No. 154 appeared only
on August 6th, the day after the Germans took the city. The paper’s situation,
however, was little changed. Contact with out-of-town readers was as difficult
as it had been in Russian times. In place of the Russian censor, a German
censor had arrived and he, too, forbade publication of the truth about the
catastrophic hunger and epidemic diseases from which the population was suffering
under their occupation. Each item of news, each notice had to be taken to the
censor for vetting prior to publication and, were
someone to dare publish something without the censor’s approval, he could
expect to face dire consequences. The paper was not
confiscated, but the high fines
imposed severely taxed the paper’s finances, which were quite poor at that
time. Nehemiah Finkelstein had in his archives a sizable collection of German
penalty notices that testify to the regular increase in the size of such fines.
Official documents show that, as early as in April 1915,
i.e. roughly five months before their arrival in Warsaw,
German high officials, including chief of staff Count Paul von Hindenburg
(1847-1934), had already been informed of what Haynt had written about the pogrom in Kalisz and about what German
troops had done there. Yeshaya Unger has written
about this in his memoirs, which the reader can find in the second section.
For this reason, it was possible to write freely about the
murders of Jews carried out by the Russians prior to their being driven out of Poland.
Jacob Pat (1890-1966) published a series of articles in Haynt about the expulsion of the Jews, driven by the Russians from
their homes. The first article was published on September 21, 1915, under the title “On the road with 1002
exiled Jews.” Pat later often wrote for Haynt,
but, when he began to write for the Bund press in 1919, he began to attack Haynt and to pen stiff polemics on
Jewish national politics and Zionist issues.
The German occupation authorities gave the Poles political
promises for the future, but, for the time being, things remain bad. The
occupying power plundered the land and the people went hungry.
The Jewish population remained quite cold to the small mercies
shown to them by the Germans. Jewish leaders understood that the occupiers were
seeking to bring the Jews over to their side as a counterweight to the Poles
and they would not allow themselves to be used in this fashion. It was clear to
them that they should by no means lend a hand to anything that might be used to
block Poland’s
aspirations for statehood. After the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, the
Zionists had come to favor a victory by the coalition countries and they
stopped taking part in political negotiations with the German authorities in Warsaw.
Only the insignificant group of the Folkists that had
arisen during the time of the occupation had cast its lot with the occupiers,
believing that they would give the Jews national-cultural autonomy in Poland.
They failed to under-stand that the Poles would never agree to such a thing and
that the Germans would not enter into conflict with the Poles for the sake of
the Jews.
On October 26,
1916, the Folkists initiated the
publication of a daily newspaper called Warszawer Togblat [The Warsaw Daily]. Its editor in chief was Lazar Kahan (1885-1946) and articles were written by H.D. Nomberg (1876-1927) and Nojech Prylucki {1882-1941).
All three were leaders of the Folkspartei. Funds for the publication were provided by
the Germans.
It didn’t take long for the Germans to realize that the Folkists were not going to be the kind of clients they had
wanted. They lacked insight into the
Jewish community and had no significant following. In search of other Jewish allies, the Germans
cast their eye of the Hasidic masses that were not organized in a party
structure, but which blindly followed their rabbis and rebbes’
bidding. In order to organize the
Hasidic masses for their purposes, the
Germans called upon the military chaplains Rabbi Dr. Pincus
Cohn (1867-1942) and Rabbi Dr. Emanuel Carlebach
(1874-1927, an uncle of Dr. Azriel Carlebach, who was
later to be a Haynt correspondent),
two fanatically orthodox Jews of
Frankfurt ultra-orthodox style. These
rabbis had spoken with other rabbis and rebbes and
had organized the Orthodox Union or Agudah as they
called it, that worked hand-in-hand with the occupying forces. It was not difficult for the rabbis to gain
funding for the Agudah publication Dos Yudishe Vort [The Jewish Word]. The Folkists were
no longer necessary and the German subsidy for their paper was discontinued.
The Yudishe Vort was
filled with lies, gossip and false accusations against Zionism and the Zionists
that the “Torah-true” paper put out with the help of its hired hacks (see
Chapter 9). Haynt fought off the
anti-Zionist attacks and unmasked the rabbis who stood behind the campaign.
Under prevailing conditions of Polish-Jewish relations at
the time, the task of Haynt was not an easy one. In 1916, there were Warsaw city council elections. For the first time since they lost their
independence, Poles had a chance to elect their own representatives. The municipal elections turned into a political
manifestation of the Polish people the path to the future Polish state. In the election platforms of the parties,
they spoke more about political programs of national scope than about practical
matters of governance in Warsaw City Hall. The
City Council elections were
a symbol of
struggle for Polish independence and the Polish politicians made great efforts
to present a posture of solidarity of the entire population in the capital city
of the future Polish state.
The Jewish leaders
joined in solidarity with the Poles.
They wanted to forget about the aftermath of the Jagiełło
vote and agreed to form a common electoral front with the Polish parties. For the sake of peace, the Jews accepted
compromises and the resulting “consolidation,” as the election pact was dubbed,
did not turn out especially well for the Jewish side. The Jews did not receive the number of seats
they should have in accordance with the percentage of the Jewish voters amongst
the general electorate in Warsaw; moreover, they obligated themselves heavily in terms of the Jewish
political posture in the City Council.
The Folkists did not belong to the
“consolidation” and they conducted a highly activist election campaign. Nojech Pryłucki was elected along with three other Folkists, although Haynt had opposed them for
breaking with Jewish unity.
In spite of the
boycott and bitter antisemitic agitation, Haynt had backed the “consolidation,” but it was evident from the reaction
of the readership that the paper hadn’t made clear its motives justifying the
electoral pact with the Poles. The
Jewish members of the City Council followed a moderate policy in line with the
united front and Haynt supported them in this. The readers couldn’t comprehend this and the
prestige of the newspaper suffered as a result.
Meanwhile, the
rabbis of Frankfurt were seeking ways to strengthen the
influence of the Hasidim. At their
initiative, Dr. Ludwig Haas (1875-1930), chief of the Jewish section of the
administration in German-occupied Poland, composed a community statute that
effectively turned over power in the Jewish communities to the Hasidim and
their allies, the assimilationists. This
statute limited the competence of the Jewish community councils (kehillot) solely to religious matters. For secular or cultural needs, other than the
cheders, religious schools and handicrafts courses,
the Jewish community councils could not authorize any funding from their
budgets. The Polish authorities later
adopted this principle of religious communities from the occupiers and included
it in their own statute. The election of
community councils was supposed to take place on a democratic basis, but the
regime maintained control of the
budgets, which were effectively limited to meeting religious
needs.
At that time, there arrived in Warsaw
an emissary from Berlin to review
the Jews’ election process. This
emissary was a young man some twenty years old.
His name was Nahum Goldmann (1895- ). It was said that he was a Zionist, spoke
marvelous Yiddish and that he was staying with his uncle, the author Abraham-Leib Szolkowicz (Ben-Avigdor, 1866-1921), owner of the Tuszija
publishing house. He was also a frequent
visitor to the home of yet another uncle, Szmuel-Leib
Gordon (Shelag, 1865-1933), a well-known Hebrew
writer and owner of Warsaw’s first – and for a long time only – cheder metukan (“reformed”
schoolhouse), where children learned
the Hebrew language in Hebrew and, not only that, but with Sephardic pronunication – a great novelty in those years. (Orthodox Jews saw such cheders
as a potential danger to the faith and [in a play on words] would call such a
school a “cheder
mesukan” [a dangerous cheder].)
The Gordon family home was known as the only one in Warsaw
in which no language other than Hebrew was spoken – even with the help. This principle was strongly maintained by the
mistress of the house, Mrs. Malka Gordon, a sister of
the poet Yehoash.
The children belonged to the Yardenia youth
movement and were active in the Zionist
Center (Merkaz
HaTzionim), where the Zionist activities of Warsaw
were concentrated (see Chapter 10). The
elder son, Mosze, later became the director of Mosad Bialik, the Bialik Institute in Jerusalem.
The rabbis of Frankfurt were functionaries (counsellors for Jewish affairs) of the military occupation
authorities in Warsaw, but the central civil authorities in Berlin wanted their
own report on developments in Poland and Nahum Goldmann,
despite his youth, became director of the Jewish affairs department of the
German Ministry of the Interior and was delegated to report on the elections
among the Jews. In Warsaw,
he was in contact with the Zionist leaders and kept them informed of the
international political situation as it appeared in Berlin
and of the plans that the German authorities had for Poland. The writers of Haynt used to take part in Goldmann’s
briefings and, from that point on, he was associated
with the paper and remained so for the rest of the paper’s existence. In 1938, Goldmann
became a member of the honorary committee for Haynt’s thirtieth-anniversary celebrations.