Protocol of the Katowice Conference – Hebrew Edition, 1884 – "Printed as a Manuscript"

Protocol of the Katowice Conference – Hebrew Edition, 1884 – "Printed as a Manuscript"
Protocol of the Katowice Conference of Hovevei Zion. [Katowice?], the year " He saves those who are crushed in spirit" (chronogram of the year 5645), [1884?]. First edition, for participants of the conference (title page states: "printed as a manuscript"). Hebrew.
Proceedings of the five meeting of the Katowice Conference of Hovevei Zion leaders, 6-11 November 1884. The conference was attended by 36 Zionist leaders (including Rabbi Shmuel Mohilever, Yehuda Leib Pinsker, Ahad Ha'am, David Gordon and others), their goal being to establish an organized movement for settling Palestine. Since Zionist activity was prohibited in Russia by law, the true goal of the conference was concealed and it was presented as a conference for the 100th anniversary of Moses Montefiore's birth.
The opening speech of the chairman Yehuda Leib Pinsker, in which he stressed the necessity for the Jews to return to work on the land, is printed in this booklet in full: "let us today take up the plow and spade instead of the measuring tape and scales and let us become once more what we had been before we fell into the discredit of other nations […] Let us return to our old mother, our land, which we have awaited with great desire" (Julius H. Schoeps, Pioneers of Zionism: Hess, Pinsker, Berlin-Boston: de Gruyter, 2013, p. 44).
This edition was presumably printed in a few dozen copies only and distributed to the participants of the conference (an additional German edition was published, in which the nationalistic and Zionist parts of Pinsker's speech were omitted). In 1920, a second edition of the booklet was published by the writer Leibl Toybsh (Vienna: Adria Press), and in its introduction it was written: " This protocol was printed at the time 'as a manuscript', in a number of copies as the number of participants of the conference and members of the selected committee of Katowice. Thus, this protocol is rare and cannot be found even in libraries; even the Zionist bibliographers did not know of it…".
Two copies only in OCLC.
40 pp. 15 cm. Good-fair condition. Stains, creases and small tears to margins. Worming to several leaves (some unprofessionally restored, with tape). No binding.