I found a microfilm at the NYPL containing programs from events held by the Independent Kletzker Brotherly Aid Association and a few other similar New York-based Jewish Benevolent Associations. They started holding relief balls in 1936 to raise money for Jews back in their hometowns in Poland.
In the introductory letter to the 1st Annual Relief Ball they write, “We have determined that we will not stand mutely and idly by and allow this despotic inquisition of our brothers and sisters in Poland, a pawn of the economic crisis of that nation.”
Although the program is almost entirely in Yiddish, this section is in English. It’s from Feb 8, 1936 and references two pogroms that were reported in the news within the previous two weeks. The tone is something close to sheer panic.
I guess what I’d like to better understand is how explicitly anti-semitism was expressed within the Polish political context. And what the Polish political context was. The violence that occurred wasn’t prosecuted and that telegraphed that it was sanctioned by the state? And what was the economic crisis that they’re talking about? A boycott of Jewish businesses that harmed Jewish people or a larger economic crisis?
And I am also wondering how American Jews were conceptualizing this violence. I’ve seen a lot of references to fears about starvation and privation. Was it widely understood that Hitler was going to move into Poland?
I feel like I’m really not articulating this well...but any kind of context would be so helpful! Thanks!
According to Piotr Gontarczyk, collection of money for Jewish residents resulted in a growing negative propaganda aimed at Poles. As Gontarczyk wrote, volunteers, while collecting funds, presented the picture of Poland as a "wild country of pogroms", hoping to collect as much money as possible. The tendentious information about the situation of Jews in Poland created false stereotypes of antisemitic Poles.
These two pogroms don’t seem to have left much impression in the histories, but may be the first concrete sign of the deterioration of Polish Jews’ political circumstances following the relatively tolerant national strongman Pilsudski’s death in May 1935: within a couple of years his successors were contemplating shipping their Jewish compatriots to Madagascar, a project later revived by the nazi occupiers before being again ruled out as impractical.
The reported incidents would almost certainly have been local, like other scattered outbreaks in 1936-37, and probably owed less to official prompting than to agitation by the likes of Dmowski’s conservative National Party, which had lately lurched still further to the right. The failure to prosecute the culprits may have been on the part of top leaders or just sympathetic local officials.
The “economic crisis” is Poland’s exceptionally harsh experience of the world Depression, deepened and prolonged here by the regime’s disastrously deflationary adherence to the gold standard until April 1936. Boycotts of (and attacks on) Jewish businesses rose sharply after shops were ordered in August 1936 to display the owner's name.
A German takeover wouldn’t be considered particularly likely at this time: Hitler was yet to remilitarize the Rhineland, and Poland and Germany had been on good terms since the 1934 non-aggression pact. But the German precedent and the wider rise of anti-semitism in Europe would be of obvious concern.