48 Friday, July 1, 1977 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Boris Smolar's 'Between You ... and Me' Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, JTA (Copyright 1977, JTA, Inc.) INSIDE THE JDC: Something hew was presented recent- ly at the two-day Joint Distribution Committee conference in New York to Jewish community leaders assembled from various parts of the country. It was for the first time that the newly-formed MK area committees reported to the JDC board on problems con- cerning their respective areas. Benefitting from the innovation will be the Jewish com- munities in each area which receive JDC aid, as well as the JDC itself. The communities will have a group "in- side" the JDC leadership dedicated to their needs and to securing maximum assistance for these needs, while the JDC will have on its area committees members who will be fully acquainted with the problems in the respective areas, will often visit the area in which they are inter- ested, and will intensify their activity for the JDC. THE JDC SCOPE: To understand the functions of the newly established area committees, it is sufficient to say that the JDC will this year spend $36 million. About 25 per- cent of this sum will be spent in Israel. In the East Eu- ropean area, the JDC will spend some $9.5 million includ- ing $6 million for its Relief-in-Transit program and close to $3.3 million for Jewish needs in Romania. In Western Europe, the JDC will spend about $4 million to maintain Jews who emigrated from the Soviet Union and found themselves stranded in Vienna and Italy, await- ing entrance visas to the United States, Canada and other countries outside of Israel. More than $2 million will also go to France to help maintain and absorb thousands of Jews from Arab countries who found refuge in French cities. In the Moslem countries, JDC will spend $1,660,000 on its program in Iran. It will spend some $2 million in Morocco and Tunisia—two Arab countries where JDC is permitted to function; - it will also reach Syrian Jews with aid. It con- ducts a program of assistance in Latin America, and has allocated this year $3 million to ORT for vocational train- ing of Jews in various countries. Although not an Orthodox body, the JDC now spends more than $1 million a year on supporting some 100 yeshi- vot in Israel. The JDC supports 163 yeshivot in various overseas countries. - - - - The JDC will allocate this year more than $3.5 million for care of Jewish aged, including the Malben homes in Is- rael which it had established for the aged victims of Naz- ism who lost their families in the Holocaust. It spends on health services to needy Jews in various countries more than $3.5 million a year. It maintains feeding programs in schools and canteens in a number of countries overseas at a cost of $1.5 million. THE SOVIET BAN: The JDC is not permitted to operate in the Soviet Union, Poland, and other Communist coun- tries, except in Romania. It was the JDC that put Polish Jewry back on its feet following World War I, when the country had 3.5 million Jews, most of them destitute and in need of aid. In the Soviet Union, too, the JDC has played a tre- mendous role, through its "agrojoint" office in Moscow, which in the early years of the Communist regime was per- mitted to operate in Russia. With funds from American Jewry, the agrojoint offered more than 200,000 Jewish fami- lies land in Crimea and in the Ukraine, converting them into productive farmers restored to full citizenship rights. It was the agrojoint that brought the first tractors into Rus- sia and introduced modem methods of farming which made the uprooted "declassed" Jews excellent land work- ers praised by many Soviet agricultural experts who vis- ited their settlements. Nevertheless, the Kremlin ordered the agrojoint in 1939 to liquidate its-operations and to leave the Soviet Union. Today, the JDC spends about $2.3 million a year provid- ing relief to Jews in Romania through their organized com- munities, with the permission of the Communist govern- ment there. It also sends aid to the Jewish communities in Yugoslavia. Jews emigrating from the Soviet Union and stranded in Vienna or in Italy while awaiting entrance visas to the United States, Canada and other countries out- side of Israel, are being helped by the JDC to the extent of about $4 million this year. Another form of aid to needy Jews in East European countries in the JDC program is sending them foOd and clothing parcels. New Poems by Ruth Finer Mintz: Jerusalem Poems—Love Songs == Ruth Finer Mintz has risen to an undisputed rank of leadership among Jewish poets. Her works have been featured in leading literary periodicals. Since the ap- pearance of her collected poems in "Travels Through Time" — it was reviewed in The Jewish News Nov. 6, 1970 — her achievements have gained added acclaim. "Jerusalefn Poems — Love Songs" is her newest work. Creditably, it was published in Jerusalem, by Masada Press. It is a high- ranking collection of her poems, in English, with Hebrew translations by noted Hebraic scholars. Mrs. Mintz wrote her poems in Jerusalem, from 1956 to 1976. Back for a time in Los Angeles, she has just returned to Jerusa- lem where she gained her greatest inspiration. Her new poems are not all about Jerusalem. Im- bedded in them, however, is the love inspired by the Holy City. The beauty of her work, its depth and impressive ,r4L2 tn) rik:pplj : , n47- , nTe4 pinD I Know When I Butter Bread 211o'? rIppt nvn ,4x0 r)L77 1 r;). nRirn rJz idealism, can best be appre- ciated by a sampling of an original with its Hebrew translation, from "Jerusa- lem Poems—Love Songs": '217 :mtt na 'Tan; n 1 14 ntV "" I know when I butter • somewhere the swolle y of a child ceases crying for food.. I know when I bed my son soft on some doorstep, a mother wraps her infant in a dirty shawl. I know too, when my heart sings, somewhere in an empty room echoes the silent weeping of a stone. `Forgive me, or is it you who beg my pardon?' • "1`.717 n.r71x 11-1'?b rr.)citP n'ti,j1P.n 7 ?73 Translators into Hebrew of Mrs. Mintz's poems in her new book include Simon Halkin, Shin Shalom, Ha- noch Kalai, Amir Gilboa, Avraham Huss, Reuben Shari and Leah Tantzman. Resistance Fighters and_Victims of locaust Ho Will Always. Recall the Horrors of Nazism NEW YORK—In July 1942. a young Jewish Resist- .ante fighter smuggled a let- ter penned in her own blood out of a Gestapo compound near the Polish town of Vilna. "I am going to die," wrote Liza Magun, a cou- rier for the then-fledgling United Partisan Organiza- tion of the Vilna ghetto. "Keep the organization alive." Her name became a sym- bol of courage and in- spiration for thousands of Jewish partisans through- out Eastern Europe during the war. "I will always remember her name as long as I live," said Morton Shames, one of a dozen surviving members of the under- ground movement who met recently with students at the City University of New York who are studying the Holocaust. About 60 students and fac- ulty members watched as Shames' wife, Lucy, a labo- ratory technician at the col- lege who organized the reun- ion, showed slides of the Re- sistance members in their youth and of the Jewish graveyards. We couldn't community inside the bar- deny what was happening. bed-wire fences of the 'Vilna We saw it." ghetto. At the height of the resist- "This is my life, this is ance, 400 people were organ- all my life," Mrs. Shames ized into fighting battalions repeated tearfully as each in the woods around Vilna. new slide appeared. Farther to the north, around what is today the "I will have nightmares Russian City o Novogorod, for the next few weeks," an even larger band of fight- said Berle Druskenik, "but ers, led by Tuvia Belsky, all of this must be put on kept several thousand heavi- the record. All of us are ly armed German soldiers going to die soon. - from participating in bat- Druskenik was one of the tles on the Russian front. founders of the United P arti- san Organization, 'which Belsky, who, at the age of started with three members 70 is still a bearish man, in Vilna and grew to more had more than 1,250 fight- than 125,000 partisans ers scattered throughout across Europe by the end the Siberian woods. They of the war. were responsible for the de- "Everyone has to know struction of power stations, that not only did six million railroad terminals and food die in the concentration supplies along the Russian- camps. but that thousands Polish border. of other Jews fought ac- Once, during a midnight tively against the Ger- raid, the entire area's grain mans," Druskenik said. supply for the winter—sev- Although historians have eral thousand tons of recorded the resistance of wheat—were burned in a Jews in several European tremendous bonfire. cities, especially the War- "Russian bombers flying saw ghetto uprising of April overhead- saw the flames." 1943, relatively little is Belsky said, "and bombed known about the scope of the entire area." the Resistance movement. The Germans thought "It all started in Vilna," "Belsky's Brigade" had said Shlomo Kowarski, a ties to the Russian Army medical researcher at Co- and; as a result, kept out of lumbia University who was some of the wooded areas. a young college student at "If they only knew how the start of World War II. few we were—no shelter, "As early as 1942, we saw no foods, no weapons at the Ponare wards of Vilna, first except for little knives in which thousands of Jews in our hands," Belsky said, were dragged out of the "they could have wiped us city and killed in mass all out." Meanwhile, survivors of German concentration camps and. other World War II refugees who fled to Britain are haunted 30 years later by the horrors of war, the British Red Cross reported recently. In a report on the 50,000 wartime refugees now enter- ing old age in Britain, the Red Cross told of a Czech woman who lived with the body of her _dead husband for five months because she did not know whom to con- tact in her adopted country. A locksmith brought to light the case of an elderly -Russian refugee who kept having locks fitted to her doors. "Every door had at least three locks on it. The old lady was convinced that the Nazis were still at large," a Red Cross spokes- man said. A Polish man reak from all strangers, mt., r- ing "Gestapo, Gestapo," in a fearful reference to Nazi secret police who helped op- erate the wartime concen- tration camps. The man now is visited by Red Cross workers. Another Polish man claimed the Nazis infested his • house in Britain with rats. He has been moved to a rest home. The spokesman said these cases came to light in a Red Cross campaign to trace World War II expat- riates. .