THE JEWISH NEWS
Incorporating The Detroit Jewish Chronicle commencing with issue of July 20, 1951
Member American Association of English-Jewish Newspapers, Michigan Press Association, National Editorial Associa-
tion. Published every Friday by The Jewish News Publishing Co., 17515 W. Nine Mile, Suite 865, Southfield, Mich. 48075.
Second-Class Postage Paid at Southfield, Michigan and Additional Mailing Offices. Subscription $10 a year.
PHILIP. SLOMOVITZ
CHARLOTTE DUBIN
CARMI M. SLOMOVITZ
Editor and Publisher
Business Manager
DREW LIEBERWITZ
City Editor
Advertising Manager
Sabbath Scriptural Selections
This Sabbath, the 11th day of Tevet, 5734, the following scriptural selections will
be read in our synagogues:
Pentateuchal portion, Gen. 47:28-50:26. Prophetical portion, 1 Kings 2:1-12.
Candle lighting, Friday, Jan. 4, 4:56 p.m.
VOL. LXIV. No. 17
Page Four
January 4, 1974
7974: Hope for an End to Guilt
A year filled with evils, guilt and tension
has ended. A new year commences amidst
shadows of tragic legacies. Will 1974 be
blessed with proper lessons from an era that
was blemished by indifference to human
values and was dominated by fears as well
as selfishness?
Serious duties devolve upon the American
people. Already on the road toward more
serious firmness in dealing with our internal
affairs, hopefully determined to re-establish
the dignity of the White House, rendering the
service our people must give to the presidency
and to constituency, there is need for unity
to wipe out the bitterness that has made the
past year one of gloom and of distrust. Self-
respect dictates not only the rendering to
Caesar what is Caesar's and to the Almighty
the spiritual, but to assure respect for justice
and dignity merged into an indivisible sense
of honor for our nation. What we do to
strengthen the honor of our people will in-
evitably have its effects upon all mankind.
The yielding to pressures from material-
istic forces as well as the threats that stemmed
from the terror that cast a pall upon the
peoples of the world, the submissions to
tyranny and to international decencies, are
among the evils to be erased.
Deep-rooted in these outrageous expe-
riences was the revival of an age-old hatred
for the Jewish people. False gods were wor-
shiped in wide-ranging campaigns of the
ghost that was paraded as anti-Zionism whose
actual target was the Jew who was confront-
ed by an anti-Semitism that degraded human
relations.
Perhaps 1974 can be transformed into a
year of peace and amity for all peoples of the
earth. Perhaps Israel is the symbol of what
is transpiring. In a decent and just world
toleration of an attempt to destroy a small
nation is tantamount to criminality. The
hatred of Israel is explicable only as hatred
for the Jewish people and as a revival of a
hoary aspiration to brand Jewry as the
Eternal Wanderer. The existence of Israel
was a symbol of recognition of a small nation
to exist and to function as a member of the
international community. An enmity designed
at that nation's destruction must be inter-
preted as an aim to force that people again
into a state of homelessness. Unless this is
branded by all mankind as intolerable, all
humanity will share in whatever blame there
may be for a design to restore the Holocaust
and to re-establish chaos on a global scale.
In 1974 a major challenge to all mankind
is: must the United States stand alone, with
only a few partners in Latin American and
democratic countries, as defenders of Jewry's
right to exist, as that existence is symbolized
by Israel?
If and when the year 1974 denotes a hu-
mane answer to these challenges, it will
emerge as a blessed year. It must not become
a repetition of 1973.
ORT's RoleWorldwide , Including U.S.
A return to normal activities, when the tensions of unending warfare subside in the
Middle East, will certainly emphasize anew the constructive work of the ORT movement for
rehabilitation through training of Jewish youth in need of training for constructive pursuits.
It is evident from the latest figures compiled by ORT that the services in Israel will
continue, as they have in the past quarter century, as . major needs in providing skilled
mechanics and technicians for Israel's economic growth as well as her protection.
The appended chart of services rendered by ORT and the kind of services it provides
indicates the many lands in which the important movement functions.
TRAINEES & TEACHING STAFF
COUNTRY*
Argentina
Total
Enrollment
Teaching
Staff
4,352
76
39
Austria
104
2
2
Brazil
787
29
5,691
526
France
India
High School
and Post
Training
Units
Second
Adult
Services
Primary
School
Industrial
Arts
976
466
18
149
368
253
117
2,450
2,419
31
11
346
12
168
1,987
2,910
104
270
822
Iran
3,292
98
52
1,266
39
Israel
45,174
2,159
360
30,422
9,487
Italy
3,076
68
61
459
1,559
1,058
Morocco
30
897
89
406
i
1,727
51
Tunisia
149
8
4
82
16
Uruguay
589
60
17
194
395
U.S.A.
333
5
5
Venezuela
599
6
3
...
Switzerland
Central
Institute
TOTAL
177
12
66,576
2,858
I
±
5
i
724
o 'this l'is.Ong should be added
halarship Pfograrns for Jewish youth in
Teece, scholarship'-and guidance
programs: for Jewish youth in South. Africa
Apprentice
Plans
j
5,265
335
51
333
599
-
127
50
37,368
15,337
7,398
j
6,473
and .other unlisted services, as well as
technical assistance projects in Argentina,
Chad; Chile, Gabon, Guinea, ivory Coast,
Mali, Niger, Zaire (Congo) and others.
The United States, with all its economic advantages for young Jews, also benefits from
ORT. The reference here is to the Bramson School in New York City which, for 26 years,
has served as the sole facility for vocational training of recently arrived Jewish immigrants.
More than 22,000 Jewish newcomers to the U. S. have been served at the Bramson School.
While the focus is primarily on Israel, it is evident, especially in view of the emerging
obstacles for university training for many of our youth, that vocational training may become
a more vital factor in assuring skillful, pursuits for large numbers in our ranks. The ORT role
thus continues among the- major services -provided for Jewry by-a vital Jewish movement: -
Himmelfarb Essays Realistically
Analyze Current Jewish Issues
As editor of the American Jewish Year Book, as contributing editor
of Commentary and as teacher and lecturer, Milton Himmelfarb has
been among the major evaluators of Jewish events in the past decade.
His collected essays and the lectures he has delivered therefore touch
upon practically every aspect of Jewish life.
In "The Jews of Modernity," published by
Basic Books and also distributed by the Jewish
Publication Society, he concerns himself with
a vast variety of subjects: secularism, hedonism
and Zionism; Jewish survivalism, the Jewish vote,
Israel's many problems, the anti-Semitic aspects.
It is a volume of universal interest, and it
retains its timeliness even though the texts are
from a period that commenced in 1960.
For example, there was the Polish-Jewish
problem, and his essays on Juliusz Katz-Suchy,
Himmelfarb
the Polish-Jewish Stalinist who was his country's
representative at the United Nations and who was ousted as "a Zionist,"
and is now in Denmark, is of special interest. In spite of the treatment
the ex-Polish Jew received, he insisted he still was a Pole. Himmelfarb's
comments are:
"As for Katz-Suchy's pledge of allegiance — 'I am still a Pole and
Poland will always be my country' — two jokes are current:
"1. The 5,000 Jews remaining in Poland have stood firm against
successive opportunities, inducements and pressures to emigrate. They
are as Polish as Katz-Suchy, if that were possible, and as little Jewish.
If tomorrow the borders of Poland were opened wide, all 32,000,000
Poles would run — except those 5,000.
"When Hitler came to power Erich-Maria Remarque was one of
the few German writers neither of the Left nor non-Aryan to go into
exile. The Nazi Ministry of Culture cared not a whit about the non-
Aryans nor about Aryans like Heinrich and even Thomas Mann, dis-
tinguished though they were. Because the culture bureaucrats did care
about Remarque, whose self-exile they thought damaging to the repu-
tation of the New Germany, they sent an emissary to pursuade him to
return. The emissary warned Remarque that away from the German
landscape — the literal, physical landscape and the figurative one of
German speech and habit — a German, especially a German writer,
must- be homeless. 'That would bring tears to my eyes," Remarque is
said to have answered, 'if I were a Jew.'
"2. Someone much like Katz-Suchy went to Israel. In Israel he
would be a Polish Communist. In Poland he would be a dirty Jew."
Regarding the debatable subject of the Jewish vote, Himmelfarb
states: "Most Jews take liberalism as such to be their self-interest
though I doubt that they think of themselves consciously as Jews wh(
they think of politics. There is no point in being self-congratulator'y
about this. It is an old tradition, and it has had its fatuous episodes."
In view of most recent experiences, these comments on the subject
of Jewish political interests are timely:
"An obvious Jewish self-interest is ordinarily hard to find, in the
sense, for example, that Negroes have an obvious political self-interest.
Certainly a candidate of a party judged to be anti-Israel could not
expect to win the support of most Jews. Roosevelt was, if not decisively
pro-Arab, at least not strongly for the Palestine policy that most Jews
wanted. Nevertheless, to this day most Jews take it for granted that
FDR was a firm friend of Palestinian affairs.
"Nor can Jewish candidates expect to rind as much automatic sup-
port from their fellow Jews as candidates in practically any other com-
parable group can from their fellows. If the Jews of New York had
been determined to see a Jewish mayor, there would long since have
been one. Jews will vote for a candidate because he is a Jew only
when other things are equal — reputation, party affiliation and the
like—or when they feel they have been slighted politically."
It is the realism, when he deals with the population implosion, the
vanishing Jew" and many other subjects that makes the Himmelfarb
viewpoints valuable for students of current history. For example, it is in
dealings with the fear of vanishing that Himmelfarb asserts that con-
version to Judaism "might offset losses by intermarriage, or actually
produce a gain." The positive apptoaches that mark the scholarly
Himmelfarb presentations - give his volume of essays special -status.
-