Margulies, Emil (1877-1943), lawyer and Zionist leader. Born in Sosnowiec, Poland, Margulies became an ardent Zionist as a young man and, after his settlement in Bohemia, had a great share in the development of Zionism there and in the West Austrian district. At the Tenth Zionist Congress (1911), he submitted a new statute for the Zionist Movement. Throughout his life he was a "political" Zionist, and in 1923 he was co-founder of the Radical Zionist Fraction (Democratic Zionists), fighting against the enlargement of the Jewish Agency by non-Zionists. Parallel to his Zionist activities, Margulies was one of the principal founders of the Czechoslovak "Jewish Party", of which he became president for a time. He also actively participated in the work on international minority problems and was a Jewish representative to the Congress of National Minorities. Margulies attained world renown through his action in the Bernheim Petition. In 1939 he settled in Palestine, where, together with some colleagues, he opened an office for legal advice. ^[2]

Emil Margulies was the ideologist, the propagandist and the leader of the Czechoslavakian Jewish Party^[1].

According to Paragraph 147 of the 1922 German-Polish Convention, Germany undertook to protect all minority rights in the region annexed to her. In a letter to the Zionist Executive in London, Margulies proposed that a protest be lodged with the League of Nations at Germany's violation of the said paragraph vis-a-vis Upper Silesia. 'A petition must be organized by Jews throughout the world and the initiative must extend to all Jews everywhere. Geneva expects the initiative to come from the Jews...They must not remain silent and wait for others to act on their behalf. [The petition] must be based on legal evidence - not on 'atrocities' - on the violation of an international agreement in that the Jews of Upper Silesia who are lawyers, hospital doctors, university professors, and government clerks are not permitted to work.' On behalf of Fritz Bernheim, a minor employee in a government warehouse in Gleiwitz who had been fired by the Nazis and subsequently emigrated to Czechoslovakia, Margulies submitted a petition to the League of Nations, since by the terms of the Upper Silesia Convention any citizen whose national rights had been infringed could apply to the League. Margulies attached a hundred applications from Jewish organizations to the Bernheim petition, much to the consternation of von Keller, the German delegate to the League, who claimed that one Bernheim had no right to speak for all the Jews. To support his contention, von Keller submitted letters from assimilated Jewish organizations in Germany who protested the right of any Jewish minority to speak on their behalf. An ad hoc committee of jurists rejected the German objection, and in May 1933, the Bernheim petition was brought before the Council of the League of Nations. In this way at least the rest of the world learned of the civil rights problem of the Jews of Germany. http://www.vex.net/~nizkor/ftp.cgi/ftp.py?places/czechoslovakia/czech.001
Weitere Quellen: The Bernheim Petition"

Im Mai 1933 wurde im Namen des Pariser Comite des Delegations Juives beim Völkerbund in Genf die sogenannte Bernheim-Petition eingereicht. Mit ihr wurde die Entrechtung der deutschen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland öffentlich angeklagt. Sie bewirkte, dass bis 1937 in Oberschlesien alle antijüdischen Gesetze außer Kraft gesetzt wurden. Diese Klageschrift, ihre Entstehungsgeschichte und ihre aus heutiger Sicht erstaunlichen Folgen sind weitgehend vergessen, ebenso wie die jüdische Minderheitendiplomatie insgesamt oder ihre einzelnen Vertreter, z.B. Leo Motzkin, Emil Margulies oder Nathan Feinberg. Klappentext zu: Die Bernheim-Petition 1933, von Philipp Graf.