302 NIEPODLEGLOSC
1932-3 in Volhynia, Polesie, and in the Lesko area, were answered by the
advance of the Polish army and police in strength, and by the razing of villages
suspected of harbouring the rebels. The internment camp at Bereza Kartuska
was first constructed in 1934 to accommodate the prisoners of this emergency.
Many Ukrainian schools were closed; Ukrainian peasants unable to read or
write in Polish were struck from the electoral register by over-zealous officials.
Polish military colonists were settled in frontier areas. The Ukrainian national
movement, alienated in Poland and horrified by the stories of forced collec-
tivization and mass starvation across the border in the USSR, looked increas-
ingly towards Germany for comfort and support.^14
Three million Jews suffered from other difficulties - from economic regres-
sion, from a demographic explosion, from growing racial discrimination, and
not least from excessive publicity. At the same time, for the twenty years of the
Second Republic, many spheres of Jewish life in Poland experienced a last brief
period of relative well-being. Jewish schools, both primary and secondary,
educated a whole new generation of youngsters. Several private Jewish school
systems — the Khorev system run by Agudat Israel, the secular Hebrew Tarbut
system of the Zionists, the Yiddish CYSHO, and the bilingual, Polish-Hebrew
Yavne system of the Mizrachi - competed both with each other and with the
Polish state schools. The Jewish press flourished, both in the Polish and Yiddish
languages. Nasz Przeglqd (Our Review) in Warsaw, Chwila (The Moment) in
Lwow, and Nowy Dziennik (New Daily) in Cracow, enjoyed wide circulation.
The Jewish theatre, especially in Warsaw and Wilno, reached the peak of its
achievement. Jewish film-makers produced scores of Yiddish movies. Jewish
scholars earned wide reputations. Jewish writers of the Yiddish 'New Wave'
issued their first rebellious manifestos. The Yidischer Visnshaftlekher Institut
(Jewish Scientific Institute, YIVO), founded in Wilno in 1925, the central agency
of Yiddish activities, could fairly claim to be one of the foremost centres of
Jewish culture in the world. Jewish politicians of the most variegated persua-
sions operated freely, both in municipal and in parliamentary politics. In the
first Sejm of 1922, the Jewish caucus claimed 35 members, surpassing the repre-
sentation of the socialists. In the Pilsudski era, the Agudat Israel threw its weight
behind the BBWR. Even in the 1935-9 period, when all democratic parties were
curtailed, a few Jewish deputies and senators continued to sit. Figures such as
Rabbi Moshe Elihu Halpern or Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the Zionist leader, were
men of national standing. In the 1930s, the ascendancy of the conservative par-
ties was overtaken by the Zionists, whose influence, however, was fragmented
into at least seven main groupings - the Revisionists, the Mizrachi, the General
and Galician Zionists, the Hitabadut (United Zionist Labour Party), and the
two factions of Paole Zion. Outside the Sejm, especially in the Jewish Trade
Unions, the Bund carried considerable weight. Jewish members featured promi-
nently both in the PPS and the KPP. At the local level, the Jewish communal
organizations, the kehillot, functioned under the supervision of the government
Starosta. By the law of 1927, they were elected by Jewish male suffrage and were