THE JEWISH NEWS

Antik$UNP4Ot SACK 111 WORt

Incorporating the Detroit Jewish Chronicle commencing with issue of July 20, 1951

Member American Association of English—Jewish Newspapers, Michigan Press Associations, National
Editorial Association.
•
Published every Friday by The Jewish News Publishing Co., 17100 West Seven Mile Road, Detroit 35,
Mich., VE 84364. Subscription $6 a year. Foreign $7.
Second Class Postage Paid At Detroit, Michigan

PHILIP SLOMOVITZ

Editor and Publisher

SIDNEY SHMARAK CARMI M. SLOMOVITZ HARVEY ZUCKERBERG

Advertising Manager

Business Manager

City Editor

Sabbath Scriptural Selections

This Sabbath, the second day of Elul, 5722, the following scriptural selections will be read in
our synagogues:
Pentateuch& portion. Shofetim, Deut. 16:18-21:9. Prophetical .portion, Isaiah 51:12-52:12.

Licht Benchen, Friday, Aug. 31, 6:50 p.m.

Vol. XLII No. 1

Page Four

August 31, 1962

Back to School-and to Jewish Learning

ThiS is the week-end of preparation
for the return of our children to their
classrooms, and for the reconvening of
the Jewish schools to provide the Jewish
boys and girls in our communities with
the knowledge they will need as Jews.
Recent, and continuing, debates over
the merits of the U. S. Supreme Court
decision on the question of the legality
of reciting prayers in our public schools
has brought to the fore a common agree-
ment — that the teachings afforded our
children should be supplemented by re-
ligious devotions. The basic American
principle is that anything involving the
spiritual indoctrinations must be limited
to the houses of worship and the homes.
In the Jewish communities, such training
also is centered in our communal after-
noon schools — except for the limited
number of children whose education is
acquired in all - day Jewish - financed
schools.
In the course of their planning for
their children's return to the public
schools, the parents in our community
must also take into account their respon-
sibilities to their children's religious train-
ing, to their acquisition of a general Jew-
ish knowledge, and their becoming prop-
erly informed about their people's past
and present, with a view of understanding
their future obligations.
We are blessed in the Detroit Jewish
community, with a well organized com-
munal Jewish school system. Congrega-
tions are cooperating with the United He-
brew Schools in sponsoring the Detroit

Jewish school movement that now cares
for approximately 4,000 of our children.
An additional number of children receive
their Jewish training in congregational
schools that are not affiliated with the
United Hebrew Schools. Actually, there-
fore, a good percentage of our children
is receiving a Jewish education. But there
are the unaffiliated, the unenrolled, for
whom provisions are being made for
school enrollments, and it is urgent that
every child should benefit from the learn-
ing available in our schools.
Until a few years ago, the percentage
of Jewishly uneducated children was very
large. Now the majority of our young-
sters are receiving some sort of Jewish
education. It is to those—the minority—
who remain unenrolled in any of our
schools that the current appeal is ad-
dressed: that the parents should contact
one of our functioning schools immedi-
ately and that every Jewish child should
be given a Jewish education.
While speaking of "Back to School,"
it is urgent that parents should add to it
the dutiful words "and to Jewish learn-
ing." We shall then be fulfilling the major
Jewish obligation that there must never
be illiteracy in Jewish ranks—and that
JeWish illiteracy is to remain inconceiv-
able. Then our heritage will be in the
hands of an informed people that will
know how to honor and respect its tradi-
tions—in turn earning the respect of our
neighbors for having protected the great
Hebraic legacy from which all mankind
is benefitting.

Planning Jewish Education on a World Scale

Except for the fact that the Jerusalem
setting of the World Conference on Jew-
ish Education served to attract wider in-
terest; insofar as its resolutions or speech-
es are concerned it could as well have
been held in Detroit or New York or At-
lantic City.
In our anxiety to advance our educa-
tional programs and to secure a maximum
of results from adopted resolutions at
Jewish conferences, we run into the
danger of becoming too enthusiastic
about the results_ that could be obtained.
The fact is that the speeches at the
Jerusalem conference did not vary from
those usually delivered at American Jew-
ish educational conferences, and except
for the ambition to establish a "World
Ministry for Jewish Education"—a high
sounding term for a hollow suggestion—
there was very little new that emanated
from the Jerusalem sessions.
The world conference was undoubted-
ly a necessary undertaking. It is impor-
tant that Jewish leaders should gather to
exchange views on the basic educational
problems, that they should plan the ele-
vation of educational standards, the en-
couragement to be given to young people
to enter the Jewish teaching profession—
thereby possibly eventually alleviating
the teachers' shortage problem—and the
methods to be pursued to improve cur-
ricula and to assure the publications of
the most useful books for our schools.
Nevertheless, it would be an error to
assume that we have found panaceas in
the World Conference on Jewish Educa-
tion. It is much healthier to recognize the
invalidity of an overabundance of speech-
es—even those that were delivered by the
most noted world Jewish leaders—and to
turn instead to practical methods of solv-
ing the problems that face Jewish com-
munities everywhere in sponsoring educa-
tional programs.
Let us recognize the difficulties that
face Jews in democratic lands. It is doubt-

ful whether American Jews will under-
take a large scale all-day Jewish school
program. That would mean our abandon-
ment of the public schools for our chil-
dren. But there is such a devoted allegi-
ance among the Jews in this country to
the public school as one of the most vital
American institutions that it is inconceiv-
able that very large numbers of our chil-
dren will be sent to all-day Jewish-spon-
sored schools that will need new standards
of financing as part of the process of a
self-imposed isolationism.
Assuming, therefore, that the after-
noon schools must be the means of educa-
ting our youth; we must recognize the
problems that go with them — the com-
petition that enters in for our children
wild are away from their neighbors during
after-school play while attending Jewish
classes, the added burdens of studies and
the tiredness that goes with them, the
additional difficulties created for our
boys and girls who not only are acquiring
a Jewish education while attending Jew-
ish schools but who at the same time also
aspire for music and dancing lessons and
have a craving for sports.
With the difficulties in view there
emerge also the problems created by a
shortage of adequately trained teachers.
We do not go along with those who be-
lieve that Israel can provide the needed
teachers, and we are rather inclined to
the view that an American-trained Jewish
teacher, who is acquainted with the needs
and views of American youth, is better
qualified to teach American Jewish youth.
Ways must be found to encourage quali-
fied American young people to enter the
Jewish teaching profession, and among
the inducements to them must be ade-
quate compensation.
These are the problems to be taken
into view. They certainly were not solved
at the Jerusalem sessions, and means of
tackling them must be found in the
communities affected.

Despite Symptoms of Fear
and Anti-Semitism, Salisbury
Finds Improvement in USSR

Harrison E. Salisbury is without question one of the best
informed correspondents on Russia. Since 1949, when he joined
the staff of the New York Times, he has visited the Soviet Union
six times and is the author of five non-fiction books about the
USSR as well as a novel about Stalingrad.
Upon his return from his sixth Russian visit, in February,
Salisbury has written his newest work, entitled "A New Russia?",
Which has just been published by Harper & Row (49 E. 33rd, N.Y.
16). In it he expresses optimism, based on what he believes is a
situation "no longer hidden under a veil of terror-stricken silence";
that Jews again have "articulate allies within the Soviet intellec-
tual community who are courageously seeking to arouse Russians
to a feeling of shame and anger at the anti-Semitic strain on the
national conscience." He concludes by asserting:
"Change—sooner or later—seemed bound to come."
Yet, throughout his report, in a chapter on "The Rise of
Anti-Semitism," there is much of pessimism. He points to the
declarations in protest against anti-Semitism by the poets Yevtu-
shenko and Nekrasov, and the demonstrations by youth in their
favor, in spite of dispersals by police. When slanderous anti-
Yevtushenko couplets by the neo-Stalinist poet Alexi Markov were
circulated, Moscow's intelligensia reacted against the anti-Semitic
sentiments. Yet:
"The indignation of the intelligentsia did not halt the govern-
ment in its anti-Jewish program. The harassment went on. At
Passover in 1962 Jews in *Moscow found it impossible to obtain
the traditional matzoth which in the past has always been baked
by Moscow bakeries. The publication of Yevtushenko's 'Sabi Yar'
in Yiddish translation was put off from month to month.
"Most diplomats in Moscow blamed the regime's insensitivity
to the creeping anti-Semitism and the increasing anti-Jewishness
to the attitudes of Khrushchev himself. The Soviet leader had often
discussed Jewish questions with foreign disputations and invariably
displayed not a few of the anti-Semitic prejudices common to the
borderlands of the Ukraine where he grew up. It was no secret
that the Premier liked to tell stories which made a butt of some
'poor Yid.' So long as this attitude persisted at the top it seemed
unlikely that an objective approach to the problem could be ex-
pected in Russia."
But Salisbury is, nevertheless, hopeful of a change. He
states that "despite all this, 'administrative' anti-Semitism, the
arbitrary dismissal of Jews from their posts or their sentence to
exile or execution, was not occurring. In the Moscow and Lenin-
grad educational systems discrimination against Jewish students
was lighter than it had been. The bars to Jewish advancement
in diplomatic service, the army or the higher echelons of the
party and propaganda apparatus continued. But the key role
played by Jewish scientists in space and rocketry had won
grudging public recognition."
Salisbury's optimism for a better future coincides with the
reports of others who have studied the USSR situation that condi-
tions are better under Khrushchev than they were under Stalin.
But the reports, as in Salisbury's accounts, show the continued
existence of bigotry against Jews and an adhesion to anti-Semitism
by officials in the USSR.
Reporting in visits to Kiev's synagogue, Salisbury relates about
"many aspects of the Jewish situation which officials did not like
to discuss," that Jews again were experiencing a time of trouble,
that it was not as bad as in the past, that Jews were not being
subjected to Czarist-like pogroms or to arrests, "nonetheless, the
symptoms of fear and suspicion visible at the Kiev synagogue
could be found in most Jewish communities."
Jews remain suspect, they are charged with spying and
spreading Israel propaganda, they are accused of graft, corrup-
tion and drunkenness, a 90-year-old Jew was made to confess
to drinking and speculation and the anti-Zionist campaign is
rampant.
Ilya Ehrenburg's condemnation of anti-Semitism and other
rebukes to bigots are nevertheless pointed to as indications of a
turn for the better since there is no longer "the veil of terror-
stricken silence" about the Jewish issue.
The numerous incidents mentioned by Salisbury leave a
gloomy feeling with the reader, whose feelings must be of hope
that the eminent correspondent's optimism will come true.

