Editor's note:  I have left off the names of the people in this letter.

On my return to New York, I have read with the deepest of interest the communication addressed to you by a committee in Ulanów, Poland.

Please believe me that we here in this office have received many many similar communications from committees and delegations, from institutions and organizations in every part of the world.  We have them from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, every section of Roumania, Czecho-Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Russia; even from India, Shanghai and Harbin.

I have no doubt that many of these communications reflect accurately tragic conditions in many towns and communities abroad.  Our European Office is fairly deluged with these appeals, at a time when the organization in the United States is able to send over only very sharply reduced subventions.

Bad as the situation in Ulanów may be set forth, the fact is that the Joint Distribution Committee for sometime, directly and through its affiliated organization, the American Joint Reconstruction Foundation, has rendered aid to two institutions in Ulanów-- a Gemiloth Chessed Kassa (Free Loan Society) and, in the second place, a Cooperative Credit Bank.  In that sense, the Joint Distribution Committee, fortunately, has been able to do more for this town than for many many other communities which our straitened means have rendered it impossible to touch.

I doubt, under present conditions, which make it almost impossible for the Committee to undertake new work, that our European Director will be able to authorize the erection of a workshop in Ulanów.  Earnest men and women, in thousands of communities in Poland, Roumania and other countries, each reach certain proposals which they regard as essential and which in turn must be reviewed by our European Office in the light of all the circumstances prevailing not alone in the special communities represented by such petitions, but in the entire field of our activities.  Our real hope now is to be able to maintain and keep alive some of the institutions which we have helped to set up and to mitigate some of the worst cases of hunger, especially among the children.

I write you frankly as a friend of the Committee and as one deeply interested in the work abroad, because you are entitled to this information.  The meager funds available to the Committee make it necessary for our European Director to exercise the utmost care and discrimination in meeting the thousands upon thousands of appeals.  Nevertheless, if you desire, we shall immediately forward and secure his opinion on this matter.  Please be good enough to let me know by return mail if you wish to have this petition sent on directly to our European Office.

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Compiled by Neil Emmer.

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