Friday, January 7, 7919 DETROIT JEWISH CHRONICLE Page Foul We the People Speak Detroit Jewish Chronicle Published by the Jewish Chronicle Publishing Co., Inc. 2805 Barium Tower, Detroit 26, Michigan WOodward 1-1040 .■■■■■•■• SUBSCRIPTION: $3.00 Per Year, Single Copies, 10c; Foreign, $5.00 Per Year Haltered as Second-clan matte' March 3. 1916, at the Poet Office at Detroit, Mich., under the Act of March 3, 1879 GEORGE WEISWASSER, Editor-in-Chief SEYMOUR TILCHIN, President Vol. 51, No. 1 Friday, January 7, 1949 (Teveth 6, 5709) Substitute for Dexter Center Because of its scarcity, an empty store on Dexter boulevard intended to be trans- formed into a youth recreation spot will be very difficult to find. Unless some pub- lic spirited real estate man or landlord in a sacrificial act offers such a center, it seems to us that the Community Council and the Jewish Center should look for substitute quarters. These should be available in the various Synagogues, Hebrew schools and communal offices in the area. We do not mean that these should be permanent substitutes, for a building where recreational activities can be centered in one spot is much the more practical idea. • • • There are many afternoons and evenings when the social halls and classrooms at the Bnai Moshe or Shaarey Zedek or Jewish National Fund offices or the Yeshivah can be taken over by the Center for meetings of clubs or for recreational pursuits of youngsters and adults. Certainly these public organizations will not turn a deaf ear to a plea for use of their facilities on a temporary basis as long as the Center is willing to pay janitorial fees and per- haps the electric costs in proportion. United Hebrew School rooms have been available to the Center for crafts, drama and sports groups, and the undertaking has proved enormously successful. There is no reason why like success will not be met in temporary quarters in Synagogues or other institutions. The Negev Offensive • It should be pointed out in surveying Israeli reasons for its present offensive in the southern desert that the Egyptians, who have now been ignominiously driven out, were in the Negev aS invaders, pure and simple. No people with any self-res- pect could be asked to sit complacently by and see its territory violated with the ap- parent condonation of the powers. To those who would brush aside this argument as either idealistic or a flouting of the mandate of the UN, we must em- phasize that an expected Egyptian attack to offset Abdullah's recent successes had to be forestalled. Secondly, it should be remembered, Israel agreed to the Negev cease-fire on the condition that an armistice would be speedily arranged. Egypt stalled and the truce negotiations collapsed. If Egypt is sincere in arguing that she had no intention of renewing her offensive, it must still be countered that Israel could not countenance a truce protecting foreign invaders and which showed no signs of developing into a peace settlement. Had the UN insisted on Egyptian com- pliance with its armistice resolution, the new turn of events could be averted. There seems to be no justification, then, for Secur- ity Council insistence on Israeli compliance in view of its apathy to Egypt's stalling. A View on Hungai, In view of recent events in Hungary, we believe that Detroit Jews, particularly the large segment with Hungarian antecedents, will be interested in the recent report on the country by George Seides, American newspaperman who publishes the fearless weekly "In Fact." Hungary, he says, has made a marked recovery and there is an abundance of food there now. The standard of living for working people and farmers is higher than before the war, he declares. lie denies reports of terrorism as alleged by American correspondents and refutes the assertion that Hungary is a Communist state. Only a handful of Jews are left in the country and these, he points out, will ever I, KIK. AOPULLMI Sit AI IN THE NAME OF IfiE — DETROIT 26, Mich. be grateful to the Russian army which saved the remnant. "I am still not a Communist," Endre Treppauer, one of them told Seides. "I am a middle-of-the-road man, and I vote that way. But I shall never say anything but good for the Soviet Russians and I shall never oppose any Communist , policies in my country." Colleges and universities, once open only to the very wealthy and practically closed to Jews, are free to the public today, he reveals. One of the new regime's biggest boasts, Seldes adds, is that every boy and girl in the land can now get a college edu- cation. • • • Cardinal Mindzenty, who was arrested last week on charges of treason, is char- acterized as a fascist and an anti-Semite. According to the undersecretary for foreign affairs, Ivan Boldiszar, the cardinal would rail against the Jews to every newspaper correspondent who interviewed hint. One of the correspondents, a British journalist, was told by the churchman, that "a group of dwarfed men are ruling the country; the majority consists of a Jewish gang of terrorists; Jewish sadists are torturing Hungarians at 66 Andrassy Strasse, where scores of priests are imprisoned and tor- tured, and naked women paraded before them." • "The statements of the cardinal were false," Boldiszar asserted. "The British woman, however, did not tell him that. All she said on leaving him was: 'I am the daughter of the Jewish Rabbi of White- chapel'" Her name is Bertha Caster. Boldiszar disclosed that 900,000 Hungar- ian Jews were murdered by the Nazis. Resistance fighters, he said, secretly called on Cardinal Seredi, Mindzenty's predecessor, to ask him to stop the slaughter since the Hungarian Nazis were good Catholics and one word from the cardinal would have saved the Jews. Seredi's response, accord- ing to Boldiszar, was that he could not mix into politics. The whole story can be found in the Dec. 20 and 27 issues of "In Fact." No Quarrel With JSSB We would. be dishonest with ourselves if we failed to acknowledge that we merited some of the criticism leveled at us by Mor- ris Lewis in his Letter to the Editor on our editorial comments on the JSSB. We have fortuitiously learned Lewis' identity and we feel that his words were motivated by a sincere analysis. We would like to clear up this point: We are not quarreling with the JSSB on the caliber of its services. We have agreed that the organization is generally known to be one of the top social welfare agencies in the city and we do not know anything to controvert that opinion. • • • What vexed us was the agency's refusal to answer questions submitted to it in good faith. It is not the agency's prerogative to decide whose criticism it should answer and whose disdain. Our point is that the JSSB, an agency supported by public funds, is answerable to the press even if it considers the pfess capricious. We believe its contemptuous treatment of the Chronicle unwarranted. 4 r4 4 Letters to the Editor ALDER SOUGHT Dear Editor: Information is being sought of the whereabouts of Ivan Gor- don Alder alias Martin Alder on behalf of his wife, Minnie, and six minor children whom he has failed to support since February, 1948. He is 30. 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighs 180 pounds, has brown hair, blue eyes, scar on left side of head, also scar on left leg, wears glasSes occasionally. Any- one aware of his location is re- quested to communicate with the National Desertion Bureau, 105 Nassau Street, New York 7, N. Y." SAMUEL EDEI.STEIN, Assistant Secretary. PRENZLAUER THANKS Dear Editor: I want to thank you most sin• cerely on behalf of the Eva Prenzlauer Maternity Aid. Your kind cooperation has made it possible for us to achieve such a wonderful response for our donor luncheon. MRS. SAMUEL KUHLIK. Truman Gesture of Amity Stirs Americans of Goodwill By WILLIAM ZUKERMAN (Jewish World News Service) NEW YORK—President Tru- man's act in attending the testi- monial dinner of his former partner, Eddy Jacobson in Kan- sas City, was a beau geste of democracy at its best and typi- cal of the President as well as of the average American whom he represents. A personal report of the event in the New York Morning Journal by Rabbi Moshe Doved Solomon who participated in the dinner, gives a graphic ac- count of the incident. According to the Rabbi, the President's visit was a complete surprise to Jacobson as well as to most of the audience. The dinner was tendered to Jacobson by the Jewish commu- nity of Kansas City in recogni- tion of his philanthropic activi- ties. The guests were mostly Jewish business men, communal workers, with a sprinkling of Rabbis. • • • IN COMES PRESIDENT SUDDENLY THE DOORS of the hotel . dining room opened and the President, accompanied by his brother and newspaper- men, appeared and sat at the table. The President's words about his partner Eddy were simple, sincere and folksy. He related stories known to the average American small business men of how he and his partner strug- gled to keep their haberdashery going, and failed. From these personal and trivial remarks he passed to deliver one of the most important political speech- es of many months. The impression left by the visit was tremendous. Jacobson was moved to tears and the en- tire Jewish community of Kan- sas City was deeply impressed, and so were Jews and non-Jews all over the United States. For this was an act of democracy at its best. For the head of the greatest state in the world to come down to a dinner of an old partner in business and pay homage to a common citizen was an act of humanity possible only in the United States. It was one of those simple acts which will go down, like those of President Lincoln, in the history of Amer- ican presidency and will endear Mr. Truman to the average American, Jew and non-Jew alike. • • • A PLAIN MAN MR. TRUMAN has never been a snob, and this has always been his greatest asset. But since the last election when his com- mon Americanism won such a signal victory, his un-snobbish- ness and simple. unadultered democracy have risen in the eyes of the people from a position of mere notice to that of a promin- ent feature of his character. For it is Mr. Truman's own; not a reflection of his predecessor, who was anything but un-snob- bish. • The incident at Kansas City was a public assertion of this fact and it deserves all the applause that it has received. As far as the issue of juvenile delin- quency is concerned, we have not held that the Jewish community is faced by any such problem or that JSSB has been neg- Arbitration Committee Asks for More Cases ligent in handling it. We suggested merely To acquaint the community About one new case every two that certain indications in the Jewish neigh- with its work, the arbitration weeks is brought before the borhoods implied a possible upsurge and committee of the Jewish Com- body. It also handles an equal we advised Jewish agencies to be alert. munity Council has sent letters number of problems that do not lawyers and Rabbis who may require full arbitration. A. C. It is our job to so advice and we intend to be in a position to refer cases Lappin is chairman and Louis to continue it. to it. Rosenzweig, co-chairman.