Jewish Party (Czechoslovakia)

The Jewish Party (Czech: Židovská strana) was a political party of the First Czechoslovak Republic. It was founded in 1919 by the Jewish National Council (Czech: Národní rada židovská) in Prague. It was the strongest Jewish political party in the interwar Czechoslovakia although many Jews were rather active in non-Jewish parties, be they Czech, German or Hungarian. The party adopted a Zionist political program and succeeded in influencing the Czechoslovak government to acknowledge Jews as an official national minority in the constitution of 1920.[1]

Jewish Party אידישע פּאַרטיי‎ (Yiddish) Židovská strana (Czech and Slovak)
Leader	Ludvík Singer Angelo Goldstein Emil Margulies
Founded	1919
Dissolved	1938
Ideology	Zionism
Political position	Centre
International affiliation	World Zionist Organization
Politics of Czechoslovakia Political parties Elections

In an electoral alliance with parties of the Polish minority, it got two candidates elected (Julius Reisz and Ludvík Singer, and from 1931 Angelo Goldstein, after the death of Singer) at the 1929 Czechoslovakian parliamentary elections and again two (Angelo Goldstein and Chaim Kugel) at the 1935 Czechoslovakian parliamentary elections on a common ticket with the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Worker's Party and the Polish Socialist Workers Party.

It was banned in Slovakia after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia on 25 November 1938 and de facto after the end of the Second Czechoslovak Republic on 15 March 1939.

Election results

Jewish party or list	1920[2]	1925
United list of Jewish parties	79,714 votes, 1,3%, no seat Bohemia: 19,473 votes, 0.57%, Moravia-Silesia: 15,024 votes, 1.04%, Slovakia: 45,217 votes, 3.37%[3]	-
Jewish Party	-	98,845 votes, 1.39%, no seat[4] Senate: 51,513 votes, no seat[5]
Jewish Economic Party	-	16,861 votes, 0.24% no list for the Senate

Footnotes

1. Crhová 2000, 251.
2. in 1920 there was no parliamentary election organized in Carpathian Ruthenia
3. cs:Volby do parlamentu Československé republiky 1920
4. Čapková 2010
5. Senát Národního shromáždění R. Čs. r. 1925. Archived 2012-09-18 at Archive.today, e.g. results Archived 2012-09-09 at Archive.today, Website of the Czech Republic Senate

Bibliography

• Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators. A Reappraisal. (16. The Jewish Parties of Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia – 2.4 Per Cent of an Empire), 1983
• Kateřina Čapková, "Židovská Strana", in: YIVO Encyclopaedia, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2010
• Marie Crhová, “Jewish Politics in Central Europe: The Case of the Jewish Party in Interwar Czechoslovakia,” Jewish Studies at the Central European University 2 (1999–2001)
• Crhová, Marie (2000). "Židovské strany v Československu v letech 1918-1938". In Pavel Marek; et al. (eds.). Přehled politického stranictví na území českých zemí a Československa v letech 1861-1998. Olomouc: Katedra politologie a evropských studií FFUP. pp. 250–253. ISBN 80-86200-25-6.