The First Kinus
At the first Kinus, or governing convention, an exceptional hush fell over the conference hall as Jabotinsky walked to the platform. A sea of eager eyes turned up toward him. This was the moment they had all been waiting for - those scores of earnest young men and women who had traveled to Danzig, many of them came from hundreds and even thousands of miles away. Everyone was impressed to see the Betar groups from three continents welded into a powerful instrument for Jewish national liberation.
It had been strange at first in that unfamiliar Baltic city. The delegates from one country did not know their colleagues from the next, and the fact that they all belonged to an organization which was loosely call B'rith Trumpeldor seemed to help little in overcoming their sense of isolation. Each delegation wore its own taste of uniforms. The profusion of shades, cuts, and insignia of rank made this look like a convention not of a single movement, but of a whole galaxy of movements.
But soon they found how easily people speaking in the same ideological language can get to understand each other, and how magnetically an ideal shared in common can draw the most divergent spirits together. Complete strangers were thrown into a melting pot of committees and secretariats, and emerged as life long friends, bound by ties infinitely stronger than self-interest or class solidarity.
But now Jabotinsky was speaking. He minced no words. Like a stern father reproving his wayward family, he told the assembled Betarim exactly what he thought of them for not practicing what they preached. He told them that every stage of the recognized Betar training had to be undergone thoroughly, whether or not the material and the instructors were available. There was simply no excuse, he said, for neglecting our education for statehood, because ways and means could be found to overcome every difficulty. "If you haven't hand-grenades and targets you can still learn to throw stones of a fixed weight at a point a fixed distance away."
Then Jabotinsky laid down the four principals by which Betar must stand or fall. The principals that were to take the mind of European Jewry by storm, and fire the imagination of Jewish youth as nothing had ever fired it before.
MONISM - The devotion to a single ideal of a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan river.
HADAR - The abandonment of the slovenly habits adopted in the ghetto, and the adoption of ways of living that would mark the Jew out as the aristocracy among nations, with the Betari as the aristocrat among Jews.
LEGYON - Military training for the defense of Jewish life and honor.
GIYUS - National service in the homeland without thought of personal gain.
Significantly, Jabotinsky ended with the demand that each member of Betar learn Hebrew. "At our next Kinus," he warned them, "only one language will be spoken. That will be Hebrew."
The delegates unanimously elected Jabotinsky as Rosh Betar, decided to establish the movements headquarters in Paris. They left Danzig as inspired missionaries of the faith that was to save 100,000 of Europe's despairing Jewish youth from the worship of false idols.