4464V-'04,11041C

Incorporating

THE

JEWISH NEWS , USPS 275-5201

Detroit eleleiNli Chronicle commencing with the issue of July 20. 1951

Member American Association of English - 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
Postmaster: Send address changes to The Jewish News, 17515 W. 9 Mile Rd., Suite 865, Southfield, Mich. 48075
Second-Class Postage Paid_at Southfield, Michigan and Additional Mailing Offices. Subscription $12 a year.

PHILIP SLOMOVITZ
Editor and Publisher

ALAN HITSKY
News Editor

CARMI M. SLOMOVITZ
Business Manager
DREW LIEBERWITZ
HEIDI PRESS
Advertising Manager
Assistant News Editor

4

Sabbath Scriptural Selections

This Sabbath, the fourth day of Adar, 5739, the following scriptural selections will be read in our synagogues:
Pentateuchal portion, Exodus 25:1-27:19. Prophetical_portion, I Kings 5:26-26:13.

Candle lighting, Friday, March 2, 6:05 p.m.

VOL. LXXIV, No. 26

Page Four

Friday, March 2, 1979

Beckoning to Middle Ages?

-

Is the dock being turned back to the darkest
periods in history? Are the Dark Ages beckon-
ing to the beastly in mankind to assume control
of many world areas?
Because there is no isolation, and whatever
affects even the most distant people is most cer-
tain to affect the status and existence of the rest
of the world, that which is happening in Iran
and in Vietnam and Cambodia is to America as
it is to the Middle East and to Western Europe.
For Jews, the happenings that are bathed in
horror are significant because they affect the
spirit of libertarianism and may eventually,
perhaps very soon, affect the very existence of
the Jewish state and the lives of millions of its
citizens.
Only in the Middle Ages was there an uncon-
trolled spread of hatred which caused the lives
of Jews to be valueless. This is what is occurring
in at least one portion of the world. The assump-
tion of power by the fanatical Muslims com-
menced as a revolutionary outburst, but its first
act was to expel the Israelis who had contrib-
uted immensely towards Iranian industrial de-
velopment and who were the intermediaries for
friendly relations between nations. A hatred for
Israel, baselessly acquired from Arabs bent
upon Israel's destruction, took root and made
the new Iranian regime an added curse for the
entire Middle East. Without peace between
Arabs and Jews in that part of the world there
can never be total freedom for all the inhabi-
tants and opportunities for raised standards
that will eliminate the diseased factors that
currently lurk in the inhumanities that domi-
nate the area. Instead of seeking an accord
among nations in order too -elevate the spirit of
humanism for all, a poisonous and horrifying
influence now evidences itself in a threat to the,
very existence of one of the numerically small-
est of peoples in that area. The dominance is one
of war and the world is informed that what has
been taught as rule by the sword has become the
very basis of a threat that is first directed at
Israel and can only lead to destruction for those
becoming involved in it. •
- -
Now Israel, always confronted with war
threats and never free from the agonies of inse-
curity, must deal with the greatest danger in
her history as a free nation. Now it is Iran, a
nation which had developed the friendliest of
terms with Israel, suddenly giving supreme
power to the movement whose aim is the total
destruction of the Jewish state. To the Arab
states which have given comfort to the PLO in
the past has been added another, one of the very
,few Muslim peoples which had practiced friend=
ship with Jews for three decades.
It is true that Zionism was impermissible in
Iran during the years of Israel's friendly rela-
tions with Iran. But the Israeli state hadJimited
diplomatic relations with the new ally of the
PLO. El Al Israel Airlines flew regularly to
Teheran and had an office there. There was an
Israeli Consulate. That the former should have
been demolished and the latter turned over to
the PLO as its headquarters is so expressive of
the menace that has settled down in Iran. It is a
source of greater concern than has been experi-

enced during the close to 31 years of ISrael's
statehood.
The threat to Iranian Jewry is evident. Even
if not a single Iranian Jew will dare call himself
a Zionist, the internationally anti-Semitic pol-
icy of calling every Jew a Zionist, as part of the
policy of denying anti-Semitism while claiming
to be warring on Zionism, and at the same time
equating Judaism with Zionism, thus has made
the hatred for all Jews a basis for deepening the
roots of hatred.
That process makes the threat of interna-
tional anti-Semitism applicable to all Jews, and
the world Jewish community may as well begin
to think in terms of a violence settling down on
the doorsteps of all Jews, everywhere.
This is not an injection of fear. It is a call to
realism. When the advocacy of Israel's destruc-
tion by the growing hate elements is accom-
panied, even in the most progressive countries,
by the renewed spread of the vile falsifications,
the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it is time to
mobilize with greater force defensively.
It would be sheer folly to fail to recognize
what is happening in the Middle East, the rela-
tionship of the strengthened anti-Israel and
anti-Zionist forces, their kinship with the
Communist bloc and the Third World. This re-
presents a challenge to the truly democratic and
humanist elements in mankind.
The threats are grave. The challenge is grow-
ing. The vigilant are being tested. The clock is
being turned }lack. If Jews first and then all
mankind are not to be dragged back to the Dark
Ages, there must be a fusion of the civilized in
mankind to make certain that threatened de-
struction of everything in humankind is
avoided.

•

Rabbinical -Assembly Work

Conservative Judaism Defined
in Essays by Robert Gordis

Conservative Judaism has an eminent advocate in Dr. Robert
Gordis.
Noted scholar and lecturer, a leading figure in the ranks of the
Jewish Theological Seminary, Dr. Gordis has written extensively and
has lectured widely on the subject in scores of communities.
His "Understanding Conservative
Judaism" (Rabbinical Assembly) is
replete with background material de-
fining religious developments in this
country and the emergence of the Con-
servative movement. The extensive-
ness of his evaluative data serves as a
guide for students of religion and adds
invaluably towards an appreciation of
the precepts pursued in the movement
which has its roots in the Jewish
Theological Seminary and the Rabbin-
ical Assembly-,
Dr. Gordis outlines his interpreta-
tion of Conservative Judaism in these
seven principles:
• Jewish tradition, properly un-
derstood and intelligently interpreted,
has sufficient vitality and capacity for
DR. ROBERT GORDIS
growth to meet the needs of modern
American Jews no less effectively than it served the great. Jewish
For a number of years, Red China had been communities of the past.
• The religious outlook and world-view of Judaism, with its faith
supplying arms to the anti-Israel Arab forces.
Thereby, China and the Soviet Union had been in God and its concept of Allan, offer our distraught and confused
generation a sane and courageous philosophy of life, second to none.
in accord in an anti-Israel policy.
• The Jewish way of life, embodied in the ritual and ethical
The PLO has found it necessary, however, to mitzvot of Judaism, far from being outmoded, is indispensable, both
attack China and to claim that their former ally for the survival of the Jewish people and for the happiness and dignity
now was partisan towards Israel. This may stem of the individual Jew.
• Jewish knowledge is the privilege and duty of every Jew, not
from a semi-official statement that China was
prepared to recognize Israel's existence. The merely of the rabbi and the scholar. A Hebrewless Judaism that has
fact that such recognition was to be conditioned surrendered to ignorance and has ceased to create new cultural and
on Israel's total withdrawal from strategic spiritual values, is a contradiction in terms, and must perish of
spiritual anemia. The regular study of Torah on whatever level is
areas didn't matter.
incumbent on every Jew, a supreme commandment second to none.
• Jews the world over, for all their differences in outlook, politi-
Confiscation of Israel's Teheran consulate
cal
citizenship,
and status, are members of the Jewish people, sharing
and assigning it to the PLO, whose one excuse
of kinship and common history from the past.
for existence is Israel's destruction, is an exam- a sense
• The future of the Jewish people as a creative and self-
ple of the latest anti-Jewish tactics. The tragedy respecting member of the human family is inconceivable without the
is that in the process it is another national _rebuilding of security-and peace in tiara-Land of Israel.

4

Israel as a Football?

,

entity, heretofore on friendly terms with Israel,
that has joined the ranks of Israel's worst
enemies. The very act speaks like the worst of
the horrors of the Middle Ages.

Once again,. Israel is treated like a football in
the imagination of the PLO. The USSR is con-
sistently anti-Israel. China is a puzzle. The
Arabs are enemies. All would use Israel to kick
around. What they fail to admit is that Israel
,doesn't permit herself to be kicked around.

-

• The sense of Jewish unity is thoroughly compatible with free-
dom of thought and difference of viewpoint.
Dr. Gordis points out in his preface that his efforts in this volume
are directed towards practices that deal with the survival of Judaism
in the modern world, the basic characteristics of the Jewish tradition,
the growth and development of Halakha, the meaning of revelation,
and a rationale for the observaxice of Jewish ritual practices.
Dr. Gordis' work is so extensive that as a study of religious
approaches it will be found meritorious by adherents of all elements
in Jewish ranks. For Conservative Jews the volume will be a guide
and a textbook.

4

A

1

