Student Outrage

Hundreds of Rumanian Jews, scores of Hungarians and one U. S. citizen were jostled, mauled, pummeled, clubbed and vilified, last week, by rioting Nationalist students in the formerly Hungarian towns of Oradia Mare and Cluj.

The students who had come from Bucharest and Jassy to hold a Nationalist congress at Oradia Mare, later claimed that the riots started when two Jewish butchers poured a caldron of boiling water on the heads of student marchers. This tale, perhaps true, was the only excuse offered last week, for the following student reprisals:

Synagogs Sacked. Men students burst in the doors of six synagogs at Oradia Mare and Cluj. Young women students not only helped them plunder the sacred Arks in which the long parchment Scrolls of the Law were kept, but assisted when these scrolls were stripped from their valuable, gold-encrusted rollers and publicly "soiled"/- before the eyes of lamenting Jews.

Assaults. Although more than 700 Jews and Hungarians were reputedly assaulted, last week, the international press did not seriously notice the story until a U. S. citizen, Gottfried Keller, said to be a Y. M. C. A. worker was reported lying unconscious at a hospital in Oradia Mare.

Investigation appeared to show that Mr. Keller had rashly interrupted a meeting of Nationalist students, by exhorting them against violence from the balcony of their hall. Students flung him down to those below who knifed him several times and beat him senseless. . . .

At Bucharest the U. S. Minister, kindly, astute William Smith Culbertson, instantly filed a stiff, uncompromising note of protest with the Rumanian Foreign Office and announced that unless positively asured of Mr. Keller's safety he would go himself to Oradia Mare. The Rumanian Government, impressed, dispatched a "special investigator" to watch over U.S. Citizen Keller.

Riots Continue. Although more than 400 of the student rioters were arrested when they returned by train to Bucharest and Jassy, last week, dispatches continued to report sporadic outbursts against Jews. At Jassy itself the police were not able to restrain friends of the imprisoned students who "demonstrated" by invading a synagog, while the congregation was at prayer and thrashing 30 Jews & Jewesses. When at Bucharest the arrested students were searched, their pockets were found crammed with loot, and around the waists of many young women students were discovered up to half a dozen pairs of silk stockings which they had removed from kicking victims.

/-A technical Judaic term, not necessarily meaning anything more than that the sacred parchments were subjected to the touch of irreligious persons.