THE JEWISH NEWS
Incorporrzting The Detroit Jewish Chronicle C0177 In encing with the issue of July 20. 1951
Association. National Editorial Association
Member Ninerican .Association of English-Jewish New,paper, Michigan
Published every Friday by The Jewish News Publishing Co., 17515 W. Nine Mile, Suite 865, Southfield, Mich. 48075
Postage Paid it Southfield. Michigan and Additional Mailing Office, Sule.cription 512 a year.
PHILIP SLOMOVITZ
Editor and Publisher
ALAN HITSKY
News Editor
CARMI M. SLOMOVITZ
Business Manager
HEIDI PRESS
Assistant News Editor
DREW LIEBERWITZ
Advertising Manager
Sabbath Scriptural Selections
This Sabbath, the second day of Ay, 5738, the following scriptur a l selection, mill be read in our synagogues:
Penateuchal portion, Numbers 30.2-36:13. Prophetical portion, Jeremiah 2:4-28; 3:4.
Today, Rosh Hodesh Av, Numbers 28:1-15.
Candle lighting. Friday, Aug. 4, 8:29 p.m.
VOL. LXXIII, No. 22
Page Four
Friday, August 4, 1978
Olympics as a Gateway to Hatred
Will the Olympics remain a high goal to the
most ideal aspirations for sportsmanship and an
appreciation of the most respectful achieve-
ments by the athletes of the world, or are they to
become gateways to hatred?
Had there been confidence in an existing
humanism at the Kremlin, the expected answer
should come from Russia. The mounting
tragedy is that human rights must be forced
upon the Soviet Union and under the cir-
cumstances the Communist regime cannot be
trusted to assure just rights in a spirit of
sportsmanship under USSR domination in the
forthcoming international sports games.
For Jews, not only because the role of the
Israelis is involved but also because of the
Hitlerian experience at the Olympics of 1936
and the Munich horrors in 1972, the problem
involving Russia's hosting of the games is im-
mense.
But it is not a Jewish problem. It is an issue
affecting human decency and is a challenge to
the conscience of mankind. The horror inherent
in the Russian hosting of the games is defined in
an impressive syndicated article by George F.
Will. Conceding to the anticipation of the hope-
less expectation of success in an effort to secure
adherence to the just rights of the oppressed in
an atmosphere like Russia's or an adherence to
the basic requests for an abandonment of the
inhumanities stemming from the Communist
suppressions, Will commences his analysis by
stating:
"Summer has come to Washington, disgust
with the Soviet Union has come into season, and
many people have come to the conclusion that
the United States should boycott the 1980
Olympics in Moscow. Two things are certain:
The idea is excellent, and nothing will come of
it."
He concludes his analyses of the menace con-
fronting mankind in an aura of Kremlin domi-
nation over the Olympics by stating:
"Two years from now, for the second time in
44 years, the Olympics will open under the au-
spices of an anti-Semitic and totalitarian re-
gime. With $80 million, NBC has made itself a
partner of that regime, and a hostage. That re-
gime is determined to use the 1980 games as the
Nazis used the 1936 Berlin Olympics: to present
a benign image of a nation that is all games and
no Gulag. NBC is not apt to be uncooperative in
dealing with a regime that can pull the plug.
"Here is NBC's sporting partner
• "In 1973, when an Israeli basketball team
was in Moscow for the World University Games,
the audience was packed with Soviet army re-
cruits who shouted anti-Semitic abuse and beat
up some Jewish spectators.
• The Soviet Union will invite 2,000
athletes to Moscow for pre-Olympic games in ,
1979, but it hints that athletes will not be in-
vited from 'unfriendly' nations unless those
athletes are extraordinary.
• The Soviets have asked the International
Olympic Committee to ban reporters represent-
ing organizations 'hostile' to the Olympic 'spirit
of peace and friendship.' The Soviets have in
mind, among others, reporters from the Voice of
America and Radio Liberty.
The 'spirit of peace and friendship' is cur-
rently on display in the Philippines at the world
chess championship. A Soviet player is opposing
a player who escaped from the Soviet Union and
now lives in Switzerland. It is traditional to
have flags next to each player at the table.
"But the Soviet player and his entourage ob-
jected to his opponent displaying the Swiss flag.
The chess federation's 'compromise' was that no
flags would be displayed on the table. But the
hall is decorated with a Philippine flag and a
Soviet flag.
The Soviet Union pushes, around the world,
in matters large and small. The rest of the world
smiles the nervous, twitching smile charac-
teristic of people who struggle to be ingratiating
but who know they are, and ought to be, de-
spised."
George F. Will is not alone as an arouser of
demands that Russia be compelled to pledge
justice for all, participants and the media, at the
1980 games. But there is a lack of confidence in
Russian attitudes and the resolution pending in
the U.S. Senate for a change in the Olympics
site must create worldwide interest in the exist-
ing problem U.S. Senator Wendell Anderson of
Minnesota, introducing the resolution, for
which he is now securing increasing support,
made an important statement in which he de-
clared:
"Despite repeated requests the Soviets have
refused to commit themselves to an Olympic
Games open to all members of the Olympic Fed-
eration. They have also indicated that certain
news organizations will be barred from covering
the games. The Olympics belong to the whole
world. They are not the private sport of one
nation. All nations and all legitimate press be-
long there. If some are to be denied that
privilege, then the site should be moved.
"Recent actions of the Soviets indicate clearly
that political discrimination and harassment
will be the backdrop for the 1980 Olympics if
they are held in the Soviet Union. To hold a
competition in that environment is a mockery,
and an insult to the spirit of the Olympics and
international athletic competition.
"This is not an effort at retaliation nor is it an
attempt to dictate to the International Olympic
Committee. It is simply a sincere effort to keep
the spirit of the Olympics alive and to make the
1980 games a true competition between all
athletes and countries which wish to compete.
Anything less is a sham and besmirches the
very name Olympics. There is precedent for tak-
ing such action. In 1956 I was a member of the
U.S. National Hockey team. We were scheduled
to play in the Soviet Union when the Russians
suddenly invaded Hungary. Our Secretary of
State, John Foster Dulles cancelled our trip to
protest the Soviet's actions."
To attain the vain glory of participation in the
games, demands for caution in planning the
international events have often been ignored.
Will the warnings of George Will and Wendell
Anderson bring the desired results to prevent
injustice in Moscow in 1980? The warnings of
impending discriminations have been made in
time. Pressure for the desired preventions of
indecencies will, hopefully, bear fruit in arous-
ing the public sentiments.
Hausner's Story of Eichmann
Trial, Tuchman on Resistance
"Justice in Jerusalem" by Gideon Hausner is much more than a
factual record of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1960, by
the Nazi criminal's prosecuting attorney. It is another indictment of
Nazism and a warning against its repetition.
As part of the newly published Schocken Holocaust Library, this
volume is the tale of "the incredible orgy of inhuman brutality — not
in some obscure corner of the jungle but in the heart of Europe," at
Hausner states in his 1977 preface to his revised book issued as a
Shocken paperback.
Hausner's book, first published as a hard-cover volume in 1966,
gives a full account of the Eichmann trial. It also raises many ques-
tions regarding the Nazi crimes as well as the resistance.
Barbara W. Tuchman, in an introduction to the paperbacked edi-
tion, opens with a question, stating:
"Are we never to be allowed to forget? One pleads the question in
silent protest on being faced with this vast and terrifying, yet noble, .
book." Then she touches upon the resistance and she eloquently
comments:
"If by cooperation is meant that the
Jews, at gunpoint and outside the or-
dinary protection of society went
where they were told and did what was
ordered without organized resistance,
then certainly they cooperated be-
cause this was their traditional
means of survival. It was bred in the
bone during 2,000 years as an oppres-
sed minority, without territory, au-
tonomy, or the ground of statehood
under their feet.
"Always helpless against the
periodic storms of hate visited upon
them, they chose compliance rather
than hopeless battle out of the
strongest instinct of their race — sur-
vival. Their only answer to persecution was to outlive it. Who was to
know or believe that this time death was deliberately planned for all
of them? At what stage is finality accepted? When, as in the Warsaw
Ghetto, it was accepted, the Jews fought as fiercely and valiantly as
their own ancestors had against the Romans — and as hopelessly.
"Inside the camps, what motive was there for resistance or revolt
when there was no place to go, no chance of friendly succor, no refuge?
At the very edge of the grave, at the door of the gas chamber, they
obeyed orders to undress, unwilling to invite death a moment earlier
by refusal. One's mind revolts at this submission. Yet it was the
brothers and cousins and uncles of these sane people who in Pales-
tine, when their situation was changed, fought against the longest
odds ever known in war to win, at long last, independence. Mr.
Hausner makes the additional point that lack of resistance inside the
death camps was not unique. The Germans massacred literally mill-
ions inside the Russian prisoner-of-war camps without resistance
that we know of. And he recalls the American paratroop company
inside the Bulge, executed after being ordered to dig their own graves.
They too complied.
To convey to Israel's youngest generation an understanding of this
issue and of the nature of the tragedy that overtook their lost people
waa a main objective of the Eichmann trial. It was undertaken by the
state that was wrenched into life out of the aftermath of the tragedy,
from a sense of responsibility to its people, to_the dead, and to history."