The Transfer Agreement (65 page)

By
1930,
Prague, with its Jewish population of
40,000,
was respected as a bastion of Jewish rights and Zionist activism. Czechoslovakia's first president, a Catholic named Thomas Masaryk, felt it his Christian duty to help obliterate anti-Semitism. He enjoyed close contacts within the American Zionist movement, including Justice Louis Brandeis and Stephen Wise. Under Masaryk, Czechoslovakia had opened its arms to fleeing German Jews.
²

The Congress was not the only Zionist event in Prague during late August. The Jewish athletic contest, the Maccabi Games, headed by Lord Melchett, was to be held in Prague, as was the Women's International Zionist Organization convention, the General Zionist party convention, and the Jewish Agency General Council assembly. The streets of Prague were bedecked with pennants and flags emblazoned with the Star of David. Blue and white bunting was everywhere. Large signs along major thoroughfares welcomed over
10,000
Zionist visitors in six languages—with Prague's traditional German conspicuously absent.
³
As the sun came up on "the city of a hundred spires" on August 21, 1933, it was the most logical, hospitable place in Europe for a decisive international Zionist uprising against the Third Reich.

All afternoon, spectators and participants filed into Prague's massive Lucerno Concert Hall. Undercover police guarded against threatened Nazi disruption. As spectators entered the great hall, they saw a huge portrait of Theodor Herzl hanging above the stage, framed by Czechoslovakian and Zionist flags. Beneath Herzl's portrait, just next to the speaker's podium, an empty chair draped in black signified the loss of Chaim Arlosoroff. By
8:00
P.M.,
about
5,000
people had entered, with more thousands outside unable to squeeze in. All seats, and even aisle standing space, were occupied.
⁴

The atmosphere was tense; the expected clash between Mapai and Revisionism was the topic of conversation throughout the audience. Shortly after
8:00
P.M.,
Actions Committee chairman Leo Motzkin appeared. To a round of applause, Motzkin led members of the Actions Committee, all in tuxedos, to their seats on stage. Then David Ben-Gurion, now representing the greatest power in the Zionist movement, led his Mapai delegation to their chairs. As they walked, they enjoyed a long ovation from Labor's vast supporters in the hall.
⁵

Other VIPs were about to walk onstage when suddenly a cheering was heard from outside the hall. The audience turned around to see.
It
was Jabotinsky. His supporters had successfully pressured the Foreign Ministry, and his visa was finally issued. Jabotinsky took his seat, buoyed by the hearty cheers of Revisionist supporters throughout the hall.
⁶

When the tumult subsided, the inaugural ceremony continued. The audience rose as Zionist Organization president Nahum Sokolow led a diplomatic corps, which included Masaryk's personal representative, the Polish ambassador in Prague, a British embassy official on behalf of Britain's Mandate, and Greek and Spanish diplomats representing the League of Nations. The Zionist Organization, having been accorded quasi-governmental status by the League of Nations, was not just an association of activists; it was the officially recognized Jewish-government-in-waiting. In fact, virtually the entire future Jewish government was at that moment waiting in Lucerno Hall. Applause continued until the diplomatic corps had all taken their seats onstage.
⁷

Sokolow then gaveled three times, bringing an immediate hush to the hall. He declared the Eighteenth Zionist Congress officially called to order. This brought a resounding cheer from the delegates. Sokolow then nodded to the choral director, who led a choir of refugees, formerly of the Berlin Opera House, in a short program of Hebew songs followed by Handel's Hallelujah Chorus. Each diplomat then offered a brief greeting, followed by a special statement of solidarity from Neville Laski of the Board of Deputies. His remarks provoked a long ovation.
⁸
If the traditionally anti-Zionist forces Laski represented were dropping their opposition, it was indeed a new era for Zionism.

Preliminary ceremony out of the way, Dr. Sokolow returned to the podium for his keynote address. To avoid German, the traditional Congress language, Dr. Sokolow alternated between English, French, Hebrew, and occasionally Yiddish. When he mentioned Chaim Arlosoroff, the entire assemblage spontaneously rose in a short tribute of silence.
⁹
However, the real power of his message was a crystallization of the historic choice facing the world.

"We come together on this occasion in a time of tribulation and suffering," Dr. Sokolow began. "Emancipation has been shaken at its foundations, ... thrown into confusion as by an earthquake. We are suddenly faced with the
ruins
of Jewish emancipation in one of the greatest countries in Europe."
¹⁰

His voice shaking in emphasis, Dr. Sokolow continued: "The falsehood of assimilation and mimicry endeavored to make our people believe that anti-Semitism was a passing episode which would be quickly overcome, a bogey to frighten children ....
It
is a bitter irony that the assimilationist movement should have been strongest in Germany." He suddenly stopped and exclaimed in English, "Germany of Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing, where are you now!"
¹¹

Speaking more to the Jews of the world than to the Zionists in the hall, the elderly Sokolow then asked a dramatic question: "Jewish people! How long can we go on like this? Time presses, the ground gives way beneath our feet. Whatever it is not too late to save must now be saved .... Zionism must in these days become the concern of the entire Jewish people and of the human race .... The maintenance of the status quo has become impossible. . . . How do you picture safeguarding the future existence of the Jewish people, which is now at the mercy of the ax? And to the civilized world, I ask, shall this nation ever and forever be in vagabondage, shall our people ever and forever shift about, ... yearning to find rest, and never find it? Is this not a situation which mocks the most elementary conceptions of humanity and civilization?"
¹²

"What then is to be done?" he demanded.
"If
it is impossible to restore the refugees to their country, or to receive them into another country, then the country of their ancestors must be given to them. Nothing is more straight-forward or more just. That is the problem which faces the international political world." Emotionally answering his own question, Sokolow exclaimed, "The idea of Zionism as the solution of the Jewish question must now again rise before the world like a new daylight!"
¹³

He conceded that a grand scale of action was now needed. "Two ways are open for the solution of this problem, one easy and one difficult. The easier way is to get excited, to protest and argue. The more arduous way is that of increasing tenfold the work of the Palestine Foundation Fund and the Jewish National Fund." He then stood down from the podium to a thunderous standing ovation.
¹⁴

Mapai leader Berl Katznelson closed the inaugural session with a stirring eulogy of Arlosoroff, calling him the "young and gifted leader upon whom the entire Zionist movement laid its hopes. . .. The entire Congress must mourn him. . .. The bullet which wounded Arlosoroff also wounded the heart of the entire movement."
¹⁵

The delegates had been moved by Nahum Sokolow, crying out for a solution of the German tragedy and its implications for Palestine. But Mapai wanted the delegates to know they had an equally pressing crisis to consider—the implications of Arlosoroff's murder for the Zionist movement. As the ceremonial opening of the Congress ended, the delegates still did not know which of those two issues would predominate. That question would be answered during the next days at the working sessions, when Mapai and Revisionist forces would vie for which crisis was the most important.

T
HE
POMP
and passion of the Eighteenth Zionist Congress' opening
session belied its internecine undercurrents. On August
21
,
prior to Dr.
Sokolow's opening gavel, the Mapai and Revisionist camps had each gathered to review tactics.

The Revisionist strategy counterposed a nine-point plan for Palestine addressing a range of Zionist issues.
¹
But Vladimir Jabotinsky himself understood that political triumph in the days ahead was impossible. So at the Revisionist strategy conference, Jabotinsky told his followers to look beyond the Prague convention. He fully expected Mapai to successfully isolate Revisionism. But, he predicted, after two years of Mapai-dominated leadership, the Zionist movement would be utterly frustrated. "The Congress of 1933," he declared, "is paving the way for a Revisionist victory [at the next Congress] in 1935." For this reason, Jabotinsky commanded his followers to refrain from any emotional outbursts during the proceedings—unless the Laborites tried to convert the Congress into a kangaroo court for indicting and expelling the Revisionists for Arlosoroff's assassination.
²

While the Revisionists expected little immediate success for their Zionist goals, they did demand immediate action on the Hitler crisis. In a moving speech, Jabotinsky insisted that all energies be expended to force the Congress to join the boycott movement. Nothing less than a "merciless fight" would be acceptable, cried Jabotinsky. "The present Congress is duty bound to put the Jewish problem in Germany before the entire world. . . . We are conducting a war with murderers. . . . [We must] destroy, destroy, destroy them—not only with the boycott, but politically, supporting all existing forces against them to isolate Germany from the civilized world."
³

That same afternoon, as Jabotinsky was exhorting his followers to postpone their political grievances in favor of the war against Nazism, Labor leader David Ben-Gurion, speaking to the Mapai strategy conference, demanded that his supporters do the opposite. The most important task of the moment, Ben-Gurion declared, was to cleanse the movement of Revisionism and extend Mapai's political borders to cover the entire Zionist Organization. The Labor party, controlling 44 percent of the delegates,
was
the movement, Ben-Gurion said. This new reality, Mapai leaders explained, required a new constitution to enable the Zionist Executive to expel "undisciplined" groups and/or deprive them of their rightful share of immigration certificates. Ben-Gurion proposed giving Revisionists the Inquisitional choice of pledging allegiance to the new Mapai-dominated organization or leaving the movement altogether.
⁴

After their strategy conferences, Revisionists and Mapai attended the inaugural Congress session. But the peril dramatized by the words of Dr. Sokolow did not mitigate their factional conflict. No sooner had the ceremony concluded then the Actions Committee huddled for another emergency session to form a presidium. Committee members bickered all night, with the Revisionists refusing to allow a debate on the Arlosoroff assassination, insisting instead on debating the German crisis. This only redoubled
Mapai's unwillingness to allow the Revisionists a place on the presidium, which would ultimately decide such questions. The Actions Committee's all-night meeting again ended without a decision. The deadlock meant that the Congress would have to function without a ruling coalition.
⁵

Several hours after the Actions Committee again broke up in frustration, the Tuesday-morning August
22
session of the Congress convened. Working sessions would be held in Prague's City Council chamber. Weizmann again refused to attend because the Revisionists still had not been purged. And when Dr. Sokolow gaveled the Tuesday-morning session to order, the delegates could plainly see that no presidium had been formed. For want of a better solution, Sokolow ran the session.
⁶

Without a presidium, agenda questions could not be decided, so the most pressing issues were not discussed. Instead, the session's main feature was a speech by Professor Selig Brodetsky, a General Zionist and the Zionist Organization's liaison man to the British government. Brodetsky pleaded for Palestine's gates to be opened, asserting that hundreds of thousands of Jews could and should be absorbed into Palestine during the coming few years. Thereafter, within a decade, millions of Jews could live and thrive in Israel.
⁷

The whole subject of "how many, how fast" was quite controversial among the delegates. Brodetsky's notion of "hundreds of thousands" as opposed to Mapai's "one thousand family plan" put Mapai on notice that their two-stage protracted emigration plan was insufficient. The crowd cheered Brodetsky's words, which resembled the Revisionist point of view. But to avoid any hint of General Zionist sympathy for the Revisionists, Brodetsky added a eulogy for Arlosoroff. And the eulogy led to a reprimand. "This Congress," warned Brodetsky, "must once and for all settle the problem of unity of Zionist efforts. Unity of Zionist efforts does not mean that all Zionists shall think alike, but it can mean and must mean that all Zionists
act
alike." Here Brodetsky alluded to the coming Mapai move to force Revisionists to renounce Revisionism or suffer banishment from the movement. In a telling defense, Professor Brodetsky declared,
"It
is not an Inquisition, but discipline for which I ask."
⁸