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."