THE JEWISH NEWS
Incorporating The Detroit Jewish Chronicle commencing with issue of July 20, 1951
Member American Associaton of Engish-Jewish Newspapers, Michigan Press Association, National Editorial Association
Published every Friday by The Jewish News Publishing Co., 17515 W. Nine Mile, Suite 865, Southfield. Mich. 48075.
Phone 356-8400
Subscription 57 a year. Foreign 58.
PHILIP SLOMOVITZ
Editor and Publisher
CARMI M. SLOMOVITZ
Business Manager
CHARLOTTE DUBIN
City Editor
Sabbath Hol Ha-hoed Scriptural Selections
This Sabbath, Hot Ha-Moed Passover, the following scriptural selections will be,
read in our synagogues:
Pentateuchal portions, Exod. 33:12-34:26; Num. 28:19-25. Prophetical portion,
Ezekiel 36:37-37:14.
Torah Reading Sunday, Hol Ha-Moed Passover: Num. 9:1-14, 28:19-25.
Scriptural Readings for Concluding Days of Passover:
Pentateuchal portions: Monday, Exod. 13:17-15:26, Num. 28: 19-25; Tuesday,
Dent. 15:19-16:17, Num. 28:19-25.
Prophetical portions: Monday, II Samuel 22:1-51; Tuesday, Isaiah 10:32-12:6.
Candle Lighting: Friday, 7:05 p.m.; Sunday, 7:07 p.m.; Monday, 8:17 p.m.
VOL. LVII. No. 6
Page Four
April 24, 1970
Quest for Truth on Road to Peace
Two major issues confront world Jewry
vis-a-vis Israel, Zionism, international rela-
tions and the attitude of leftists who are
deluded by their anti-Zionism.
One relates to the spread of propaganda
charging Israel with inhumane attitudes to-
wards Arab prisoners and with mistreatment
of the Arabs in occupied territories.
The other involves the deluded youth who
have been led into paths of hatred for Israel
under the guise of fighting Zionism—ignoring
the realities of a situation which demands
support for Israel's security.
The atrocity charges are especially de-
plorable. Any impartial observer who visits
Israel has an opportunity to see how anxious-
ly Israeli authorities exert their energies to
assure courtesy for the Arabs, to provide jobs
for them, to grant them economic equality.
A recent report by Ray Vicker in the Wall
Street Journal, from the Gaza Strip, gave
these interesting facts:
"Some 1,200 students from this Israeli-occupied
Arab area, many of them from Arab refugee fam-
ilies, are enrolling in universities in Cairo and
Alexandria. The Israeli government is paying for
their schooling in Egypt.
"Israel recently persuaded 35 Palestinian agron-
omists working elsewhere in the Arab world to
come to the West Bank of Jordan, which also is
occupied by Israel. There the agronomists will try
to stimulate farm production. Israel is subsidizing
their salaries."
The report by Vicker from Gaza included
interesting data regarding the refugee prob-
lem which has created so much confusion and
which has caused so much bitterness due to
misunderstandings of Israel's at titude s'.
Vicker stated:
Even as the Arab-Israeli war continues to heat
up dangerously, Israel is coming to grips with one
of the most explosive problems in the Middle
East—the Arab refugees. The situation has existed
since Israel proclaimed Its independence in 1948,
and bitterness has accumulated in the succeeding
22 years. In the Six•Day War of June 1967 Israel
took over 26,000 square miles of territory, and
with it 1,000,000 Arabs, nearly 400,000 of them
refugees.
Both Israel and the Arab nations have declined
to take full responsibility for the refugees, with
Israel putting off settlement of longstanding com-
pensation claims and the Arab governments re-
fusing to assimilate the indigents. Now Israel is
starting to move, by setting up rehabilitation and
assistance programs that include expanded educa-
tion and vocational training opportunities and by
simply providing work for the refugees.
"As long as we administer the Arab areas we
must see to the health, education and welfare of
the Arabs," says Golda Meir, Israel's prime
minister. "This is a responsibility that we will not
shirk."
Israel clearly envisages ultimate solution of
the refugee problem as possible only in a nego-
tiated peace in the area. For instance, what about
the Arabs with claims against Israel for homes
and land lost in the 1948 war? "We are prepared
to pay compensation for just claims, within the
framework of a broad peace plan," says Prime
Minister Meir. "But we are not going to hand that
compensation to an Arab government for distri-
bution as it sees fit."
Israeli officials say that 25,000 Arabs from the
occupied territories, many of them refugees, now
have jobs in Israel, and another 5,000 may get
jobs shortly. Each workday morning, a bus picks
up dozens of Arab men and women on the road
near Gaza town for transportation to their jobs at
a citrus canning plant in Ashkelon, Israel. An-
other bus takes other workers to a textile plant in
Beersheba.
Unemployment still totals about 10,000 in the
Gaza Strip. But the figure a year ago was 20,000.
And the downward trend should continue. On the
northern edge of the Strip, bulldozers have been
leveling sand dune sites for new factories in a
new industrial center. Bids to build plants have
been received from Israeli companies. It is hoped
that foreign money will come in, too.
"We're experiencing a real breakthrough,"
says Harold Sillcox, CARE representative here.
He oversees a program that is providing nearly
$8,000,000 worth of U.S. food aid this year. At the
ministry of social welfare in Jerusalem, Josef
Ben-Or, deputy director general, says that 26
schools, two dispensaries and four hospitals re-
cently have been completed in the Gaza Strip and
in El Arish, the neighboring Sinai city on the
Mediterranean. Roads, wells and canals also are
being built.
Israeli officials say they are spending $10,000,000
in Gaza and Sinai developments this year. How-
ever, the Israeli effort gets a substantial boost
from U.S. organizations. Peter Cassimatis, field
representative for Community Development Foil-
dation, a nonprofit American agency, says that
CDF has 28 projects in the region.
At Beit-Lehia there is a new road nearly a
mile long that stretches from the village to an
orange grove that supports the local economy.
At El Arish, a cooperative fish market is being
built with local labor.
"We encourage the local people to launch
these projects on a self-help basis," says
Cassimatis. "They select the project that seems
most necessary, a new school, a road or whatever
they want. Technical assistance comes from the
Israeli department of public works. We pay vil-
lagers for their labor, and the village or the
people involved get the completed project."
Other agencies involved in projects here or in
the West Bank include the Lutheran World Serv-
ice, the Catholics' Caritas, a Mennonite group,
the Swedish Organization for Independent Relief
and German Community Development. The
United Nations Relief and Welfare Agency has
food aid programs here.
The Israelis insist that projects be designed to
help the refugees help themselves. Mere distribu-
tion of handouts is opposed. "These people do
want to improve their conditions," says
Cassimatis. "They only want a chance."
There is some progress on the education front,
too. The Gaza vocational school, for instance,
now houses 40 students from the locality. "Next
month we will double the number," says Mo-
hammed Kamal Sousi, director.
Haim Segev, the big, bluff Israeli who heads
the Gaza Labor Exchange, says that six new
vocational schools now are functioning in the
Strip, supplementing the long-established school
run by the UN. "Before the war there were about
100 students attending the government vocational
s c hool here," says Segev. "Now we have
1,200, and next month we will have 2,000."
Israeli officials say they are striving to inte-
grate the refugees with the rest of the Arab popu-
lation and not treat them as a class apart. This
isn't easily done, however. The refugees pre-
dominate among the poorer Arabs. In the Gaza
Strip, the eight refugee camps clustered in shabby
huts contain nearly 180,000 persons, more than
half the Strip's total population of 355,000. Anti-
Israel biterness is deep here, and there are many
guerrillas among the refugees.
The guerrilla hostility poses problems for Arab
leaders here who are working with the Israelis.
"I am only trying to help my people," says Mo-
hammed Snliman El-Azizeh, Arab mayor of Dir.
El-Balah, a village in the Gaza Strip. Ile is co-
operating with Israeli authorities in construction
of a plant to alleviate poverty in the village.
In the Gaza Strip, it soon becomes apparent
that the Israelis have left most of the local
administration in Arab hands. Of 3,000 bureau-
crats and administrative officials in the region,
only 150 are Israelis or outsiders.
We face serious dangers on many fronts
but especially in the realm of the actual status
of the Zionist movement, Israel, attitudes of
people everywhere in a situation that calls
for a common effort to obviate obstruction.
Perhaps Israel will find a way of unfolding all
the basic facts so that the atrocity charges
will not be repeated. The removal of preju-
dice among liberals and especially in the
ranks of our own youth becomes an obliga-
tion of Jews in the Diaspora.
Glatstein's 'Homeward Bound'
Mingles Fiction With Reality
Jacob Glatstein is known as the poet, as the popular Yiddish writer
who has produced a number of outstanding novels, in addition to his
many essays and poems. Another of his novels is now available in an
English translation. His "Homeward Bound," translated from the
Yiddish by Abraham Goldstein, (published by Thomas Yoselaff), is
presented as autobiographical and de-
tails many personal experiences while
the author is on his way back to his
home in Poland prior to the last world
war.
Both dramatic and nostalgic, filled
with many human incidents and nostal-
gic references to the background mark
ed by the homeward bound travelers
the volume reconstructs an era whit ,
delineating marked differences betweer
people.
The impressive value of the net
Glatstein novel lies in his descriptio
of the variety of contrasting element
he meets on his journey. There are
the self-hating Jews and the unknow-
ing, the travelers who display prej-
judice and those who respond.
Jacob Glatstein
There is irony, pathos, humor, anticipation of events to come, and
the fact that the experiences preceded the Hitler era add somewhat
to an anticipation of things to come — to the warning, albeit implied,
of menacing conditions that afflict mankind.
A Jew's love affair with a gentile, an anti-Semite's glorification of
Hitler, a musician's desire to befriend fellow Jews—there is a merg-
ing of interests that grows out of an able poet's skill as a storyteller.
As he approaches his destination, the narrator has qualms. Was it
a direct route home? What would he find there? There is homesick-
ness mingled with drastic anticipation, and he muses as be is about
to greet his family:
"I was nervous and impatient. I knew that they were just be-
fore the last act there in the old house, and were waiting for me
to raise the curtain. This act was inevitable, but the entire house-
hold was waiting because they did not wish to end the play with-
out me. I knew quite well how it would end, and yet was drawn
there by the fear that I might miss some of what was destined
for those near and dear to me. Who knew whether they would
hold out until my arrival?"
Thus an impatient traveler, awaiting the hour of decision and re-
union, anticipates, hoping, expecting distress as much as the joy of
seeing family. And in the process there are the other travelers, the
Pole who announces the destination: Lublin!
It is clear that the anticipated is shadowed by events that could
be tragedy, constrasting hope with reality. It is because Glatstein is the
author who is aware of his people's mission as well as its fate.
The personalities portrayed represent the generation of the last
hope, on the threshold of tragedy. Yet it can not be said that it is
all despair because the poet still hopes and hopes for the better day.
In
wa w ridBr o eu an li d ty
" . we have a combinaion of prose and poetry,
fiction mingled with
Christian-Jewish Dialogue
Analyzed by de Corneille
Roland de Corneille, the
Toronto historian, theologian, scholar of
note, in his "Christians and Jews," treats the subject on the basis of
"the tragic past and the hopeful future." On this basis he points to the
positive, while admitting the negative, and he meets the challenge and
faces the confrontation with dignity, honor and firm decision to have
proper dialogue.
In the paperback, published by Harper and Row, he welcomes the
dialogue and in his book is included, the essay "Discovery" by Martin
Buber.
Also in this important volume that adds importantly to approaches
to dialogues and to the friendliest confrontations is the postscript by
Rabbi Balfour Brickner, who asserts that to meet the threats to religion
dialogue helped discover the essentials of differences between Jews and
Christian, "it can help us demonstrate
the vitality and relevance of
religion."