Russian Zionist Jew Chaim Weizmann, Russian Bolshevik Jew Trotsky, and Russian
Bolshevik (Jewish enough to qualify as 'Jewish' under Israel's Law of Return) Lenin
I've previously posted on Weizmann and Lenin meeting in a Paris café during 1910, and I'd mentioned that it was possible they had meet in Geneva during 1904; article in LifeJune 12, 1939, states that Weizmann couldn't remember whether he'd meet Lenin or not. Which is very strange, as in 1932 Weizmann had no problem at all recalling details of meeting and debating with Lenin, and Trotsky.
On the evening of December 11, 1932, Weizmann was attending a "Mass Students' Rally, organised by the University of London Zionist Society" in Victoria House, Bloomsbury Square, London. His speech to the rally was paraphrased in the December 16, 1932 edition of The Jewish Chronicle, and it reads:
On the evening of December 11, 1932, Weizmann was attending a "Mass Students' Rally, organised by the University of London Zionist Society" in Victoria House, Bloomsbury Square, London. His speech to the rally was paraphrased in the December 16, 1932 edition of The Jewish Chronicle, and it reads:
"When he first went to Switzerland, the attempt to found a Student Zionist Society at Berne, which had then about six hundred Jewish students, men and women, resulted in the assembling of eight of them in a little room. The overwhelming majority of the students were then anti-Zionist, because they thought they were internationalists. Later they announced that a paper would be read ; it was his paper. And their opponents, apparently inspired by this new movement, brought their biggest guns ; Lenin and Trotsky, who were immigrants at the time, were among them, and they had a great time. The arguments lasted three days and three nights, and the Swiss Professors could not understand why the Universities had become empty! On the third day they announced that they had formed the new Zionist Society, and their eight grew to many hundreds. Since that time, Zionism had become established in Switzerland. A great many of those students were now in Palestine occupying important and responsible posts as teachers or directing colonisation or other institutions."
Weizmann (who was warning about the peril of 6,000,00 European Jews from as early as 1936) also told the meeting:
"The position of a large proportion of the Jews in the world was, in his opinion, far worse than it ever was in a great many of the darkest periods of Jewish history."
