THE JEWISH NEWS Incorporating The Detroit Jewish Chronicle commencing with issue of July STILL. TIME- TO 11./ KIR &VI( 20, 1951 Mernrisir American Association of English-Jewish Newspapers, Michigan Press Association, National Editorial Assoe Pohlphesi every Fridai by The Jewish News Pohlishing , 17515 W. Nine Mile, Suite 863. Southfield, Mich 46075 Second-Class Postage Paid at Southfield. Michigan and Additional Mailing Offices. Subscription PI a year Foreign SS - - — PHILIP SLOMOVITZ Editor and Publisher CARMI k4 St Ok4OVITZ Business Manager CHARLOTTE DUBIN DREW LIEBERWITZ City Editor Advertising Manager Sabbath Scriptural Selections 18th day of Ar, 5732, the following This Sabbath, the scriptural selections tell? be read In our synagogues Pentateuchal portion, Deut. 7 . 1211:25. Prophetical portion, Isaiah 49:14 51.3. Candle lighting, Friday, July 28, 7 - 16 p rn. Y01.. I.XI. No. 20 Page Four July 28, 1972 Jerusalem: Unblemished by Untruths There has been great anxiety among Is- rael's enemies to make Jerusalem the major bone of contention in the Middle East crisis. The sanctity of the Holy City has been utilized as means of attacking the govern- ment of Israel with charges that Israelis are defiling holy places, that Moslems and Chris- tians are being driven out of the city that is as holy to them as to Jews, that housing being constructed is robbing the city of its traditional beauty. But there is an evident change in atti- tude, and hope now is entertained that the obstacle to peace represented by the situa- tion in Jerusalem will be removed. An ele- ment of proof is contained in the most re- cent issues of the Catholic organ, the Tablet, published in London, which, discussing the issue related to "Israel and the Holy City," stated: "There are signs that relationships b-tween the Vatican and the governmtnt of Israel are becoming less distant than they were." The Tablet stated in its editorial com- ment: "No one on either side wants to see it fJerusaleml divided again, nor is it realistic to suppose that it could flourish under some international administration, owing allegiance to no one. Stateless es cannot thrive any more than stateless persons. What might per- haps one day be possible, in the context of a permanent settlement, is a measure of inter- national accountability by the administering state. an obligation which Israel would as- some. - Perhaps the Arabs are the most serious witnesses for Israel and the state's most ef- fective defenders vis-a-vis Jerusalem. Jerusa- lem Arabs may wish political autonomy, but they would not change the economic and social freedom they possess under Israel's administration for any other system. Any stu- dent of Middle East affairs, all visitors in the united Holy City, attest to it. The problem of keeping the Jerusalem issue unabused remains, however, in all its seriousness. - A typical example of misrepre- sentation of facts was in evidence in Detroit some week ago when a group of churchmen, visitors from Jordan. painted a picture they described as one of horror inmosed upon .lerusalem by Jews and by Israel. A spokes- man for the Zionist Organization of Detroit was prompt in refuting the unfounded charges that had been made to the Archdiocese of Detroit. The reply was sent to the local news- paper which had published the Jordanian Christians' charges, but the refutation was not made public. The same group of Jordanians made the same charges in Cleveland. and there an emi- nent churchman, the Rt. Rev. John H. Burt of the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio, who had just returned from Israel, replied to the ac- cusations, point by point. Dr. Burt stated in his refutations of the proffered charges: 1. They charge that the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem and the West Bsnk has the effect of driv- ing out Christians and Moslems in great numbers. As a result, they say, the holy places will soon be museums for tourists; and the living faith embodied in neople will have disappelred. Now ('hristian holy places may indeed become museums—in fact they have such an appearance now in many w7ys. But statistics simply do not sup. port their claims of decreasing numbers. Some 14.000 Christians left the city during the period of Jordanian dominance. Since the Six-Day War and Israeli occupation. Christians have held their own. Moreover, since the creation of the state of Israel, the ('hristian and Moslem population in Israel has more than doubled. 2. They charge that Israel is making Jerusalem a Jewish city. But the fact is that for the last 200 years, Jews have been the largest community - in Jerusalem. You can hardly create what already - is! What they really mean is that Jews may now walk in the streets of and take up residence in East Jerusalem after 19 years of exclusion by the Arabs. And they resent this. They really want Jerusalem to be Arab. Today the population is about 300,000, about three-fourths of whom are Jews. Since the Six-Day War they have been permitted to live once again in the traditionally Jewish Quarter of the Old City (from which they were driven by the Arabs in 1948) and in new apartments adjacent to the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University. These struc- tures are handsome and do not destroy the charac- ter of the Old City. Slowly, Jerusalem, for the first time since 1948, is becoming a city in which Jews and Arabs are liv- ing together in peace and mingle in their thousands in the daily pursuit of their lives. There are fewer police observable on the street than in our major American cities, 3. They speak of Arabs being evicted from their homes without reason and without proper compen- sation and without proper notice. And certainly there have been individual instances of this. But it bec^me clear to me in our conversations that these instances are summarized from the last four years of war and military occupancy. Many of them occurred in the immediate aftermath of hos- tilities. The 110 Arab families displaced were provided new housing far more expeditiously than I have seen poor Blacks relocated in Cleveland. In the Old City, 112 dunams (28 acres) were reclaimed in order to resettle Jewish families in property that the Jordanian Arab Legion had exprop- riated in 1948. Some 3,000 Arab families have been compen- sated, I am told, and relocated in superior apart- ments to those they occupy in the Jewish Quarter— an area in which Jews had lived for 700 years! It is true that some Arab dwellings which had been constructed against the Western Wall of the Temple Mount were removed quickly after the Six- Day War. Perhaps there was too much haste. But this Wall of the Temple Mount is for the Jew the holiest of holy places, and in defiance of Article VIII of the 1949 armistice, Jord^n forbade Jews access to it for 19 years. One can understand the impatience that led Israel to uncover the Wall and open it tap quickly to devotion. 4. Another charge leveled by the Jordanian religious delegation was that the holy places have been desecrated during Israel occupation. Since this charge runs counter to what I ob- served during my eight-day visit. I pressed for "chapter and verse." Unfortunately I was able to elicit no "specifics." My personal experience, attested to by everyone I had met 'M Jerusalem, wsa that free access to all tv:ly places is not only a promise but a reality un- der Israeli authority. The real thre^t to the sacredness of Christian shrines does not come from Jews. but from Chris- tians who, alas, often fight about which church owns what and about the time and location of their so-v. ices. I ventured to remind the three visiting Christian bishops—Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic and Roman Ca'holic—that they. not the Jews, barred me from conducting a religious service either on the spot where Christ was bcrn or where he rose from the dead. Not once did this Jordanian delegation vol.,n- teer any sensitivity that Jews have been victims of Christian persecution. When I spoke of the fact that for 19 years Jews had been barred from the Wailing 1%4:1, they blamed it on Ben-Gurion's obstinateness. When I referred to the fact that 11 out of 12 synagogues in the Old City were destroyed in the aftermath of the 1948 war (and offered to show them photographs) they said this was one of the inevitable unhappy aspects of war, Perhaps Israel's present relations with Jor- danwill continue to be non-belligerent thanks to such new evidences of fair treatment of a subject that was the cause for much bitter- ness. Surely, the clarification of fact, base"? on the amicability that marks the rife of all who reside in Jerusalem, regardless of their religious affiliations. will contribute toward the peace for which all crave so much. Rebellion of Oppressed in Ancient Times Eisenstadt Study of Prophetic Teachings from Socialist View Prophetic teachings and the prophetic movement was "a product socio-economic development of the Jewish people . . a protest against the social contradictions of the time, against the corruption of the rural classes . . . It welcomed and provided an ideological base for the rebellion of oppressed peoples and classes against their oppressors . .." of the Prof. Shmuel Eisenstadt expressed this view in his introduction to "The Prophets—Their Times and Social Ideas," when it first was written in Yiddish, in Vilna, in 192G, the introduction from which this is quoted having been written in Moscow. His work has been translated from the Yiddish by Max Rosenfeld and has just appeared in an English edition published by Yiddisher Kultur Farband (Ykun. In an introduction to the second edition, Prof. Eisenstadt writes, this time Tel Aviv, after additional studies on the subject: in "After all my studies and comparative investigations I am fully convinced that only the approach to Prophecy as an ideological social movement and the consistent application of the historical-dialectical method of investigation can lead to a correct evaluation of the prophetic literature and its character, and serve as a correct his- torical key to the rich world of ideas in which the Prophets worked." Prof. Eisenstadt's emphasis on the social aspects of prophetic teachings was contained in this rejection of Christian approaches to prophetic teachings, embodied in the 1926 introduction to "The Prophets" when the volume first appeared in Yiddish: "The Prophets, those social thinkers of ancient Israel, and the prophetic literature, which includes a multiplicity of social and political problems, today remain outside the realm of sociological investigation. Every scholarly work which concerns itself with the social history of the ancient world generally begins with the Greeks and Romans and leaves the literature and history of ancient Israel to the theologians, who feel particularly at home here. "They see in this remarkable period of social thought and struggle no MOT:` than a tong prologue to Christianity, which really did not have the slightest relationship to the essential social content of prophecy. It is precisely this social content which they have overlooked. They have separated the Prophet from the human community in which he lived and which he influenced, they have torn him out of his national and economic milieu, out of his historical period, and viewed him only in the context of religion. "They have failed utterly to grasp the fact that the Prophet was inextricably bound to the life of the masses, and that he preached his ideas for and among these masses. They have overlooked the fact that the Prophet wanted nothing whatever to do with 'mortification of the flesh' or with fasting, and that he speaks nowhere either of resurrection of the dead or of life after death, that he stood with both feet firmly in the reality of his time and place. The only aims for which he strove were the well being of the people, and for justice in human relationships. Religion was for him only a theme, a medium for his social ideas. To see the essence of the prophetic ideas only in conjuction with religion is like looking for the taste and quality cf a fruit not in its meat but in its skin." Because he had dealt—briefly but impressively—with all of the Prophets, as well as their influence on other Apocryphal writings, Dr. Eisenstadt's study remains greatly significant in the study of prophetic teachings. Having dealt with the religious aspects of prophetic lore, from the point of view of socialistic reactions to the Bible, it is interesting to note Dr. Eisenstadt's comment: "One should remember and evaluate positively the fact that it :s only thanks to the religious covering that the prophetic ideas were accepted and disseminated by the Jewish. Christian and Muslim faLlis and that they were thus preserved to our own time in all the languages of the world." As a study of the Prophets front the standpoint of nonreligious scholarship. the Eisenstadt book adds valuably to scriptural analyses.