2 Friday, January 23, 1981 THE- DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Purely Commentary A Blessed Day for Captives, and as a Farewell to Carter End of the Period of Horrors and the Lesson for Mankind Never Again to Permit the Uncivilized Resort to Abusing Honorable Diplomatic Relations of Israel. He was the discoverer of the heavy form of hydro- gen — deuterium — and made major contributions to space exploration and to scientific explanations for the evolution The final day in the administration of President Carter of the universe and the origin of life. Throughout his life, was a blessed one for the captives. It provided a sense of since receiving the Nobel Prize in 1934, he was a critic of cheer for the-President on his last day at the White House. military force. It was blessed because it spelled release from an out- His interest in Is- rageous captivity. It -was cheering for the retiring President rael was manifested because it ended the saddest element in his administration. on many occasions, For the nation it was not only relief from horrible and one of his most tensions: it served as a warning never again to trust to impressive speeches chance in dealing with horror. The end of terrorism is a in support of the warning to prevent its repetition. Jewish state was in For the captives it was not only relief from misery, an address in De- cessation of tensions, but hope for more glorious days for troit at a dinner America into whose environs they must now adjust again meeting of the De- as human beings, as citizens of the land in whose diploma- troit Chapter of the tic services they were subjected to tyranny. An end to a American Technion barbaric act does not condone forgetting the barbaric. Re- Society. membering it, it demands caution and protective measures Among his defini- never again to permit recurrence of the 444-day abduction tive statements was committed by a government which was wrongly judged as the following: responsible in a civilized age. It is to be ex- Sizzling Middle East Cauldron pected that if any aggressive war is and Its Warnings to Those undertaken by the Who Make Israel the Scapegoat United States The Middle East is a boiling cauldron. The Arab na- DR. HAROLD UREY there would be a tions are divided, warring, territorially greedy. very determined minority at least who would choose The Arabs themselves, with the exception of the Egyp- concentration camps and death rather than sanction tians, refuse to take their own animosities and threats to either actively or passively the total immorality of a their existence into consideration when they combine on preventive aggressive war. hatred for Israel. Israel remains the scapegoat while the The Christian and Jewish religions have too area is torn asunder by internal bigotries. strong a hold on the morals and ideals of our people to The "substance of Arab unity" is defined permit them to do otherwise. authoritatively by responsible analysts, thus: Briefly the democratic institu- "If we look at a map of the Arab homeland, we tions of the United States must be can hardly find two countries without conflicts effectively destroyed before such an which have either already erupted or are about to aggressive war is possible. explode. We can hardly find two countries which Albert Einstein had a great role in the are not either in a state of war or on the road to research that led to the nuclear dis- war." This was stated by Syrian Foreign Minister coveries. Harold Urey was the chemical Khaddam at a meeting of Arab foreign ministers genius who discovered the hydrogen in Oman, as quoted on Nov. 28 by London Times power. Both men were pacifists. Both commentator Richard Owen. • were devoted to the Zionist liber- Owen goes on to list some of the inter-Arab wars tarianism. Glory to both names which and conflicts referred to by Khaddam: Morocco- symbolize peace and justice for Israel Algeria, Libya-Tunisia, Libya-Egypt, Libya- Einstein and Jewry. Sudan, Libya-Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia- Bahrain and Qatar, Saudi Arabia-North Yemen, Saudi Arabia-South Yemen, South Yemen-North Yemen, South Yemen-Oman, Oman-Ras al- Haima, Abu Dhabi-Dubai, Iraq-Iran, Iraq- Kuwait, Iraq-Syria, Syria-Jordan, civil wars in Lebanon, Syria and Sudan, and internal jolts in By DR. WILLI understanding among all all the Arab - states against the background of the GUGENHEIM groups of the population. It restless ethnic-religious-ideological minorities, Zionist Information is a founding member of the and in view of the fact that most of the leaders News Service World Jewish Congress. have a narrow power base. GENEVA — According to The SIG unites 24 Anis Mansour, editor of the weekly October and the 1970 census, there are communities: small and Sadat's personal adviser, on Nov. 23 compares the 20,268 Jews in Switzerland, large, Orthodox and Lib- Arab summit in Amman to the Tower of Babel representing three per eral, German-Swiss and whose occupants were unable to communicate thousand of the general French-Swiss. This uni- with one another, but rather fought each other. population. Of these,' only versality explains the Guardian commentator, David Hirst, writes on 11,977 are Swiss citizens. strength of the SIG as Nov. 25 that the Amman summit constitutes a Some 58.4 percent of Jews well as its limitations. Its polar contrast to the essence of the event: it re- live in German Switzer- strength is that it is the flects the inescapable Arab split and the disinte- land; 37.5 percent in officially recognized gration of the anti-Sadat "front." French, and 3.9 percent in representative of Swiss The Egyptian Al-Ahram asserts that the Pales- Italian Switzerland. The Jewry, its spokesman in tinian issue has been dwarfed by the inter-Arab most important centers are all matters concerning disputes. This appraisal is reinforced by a car- Zurich (5,477), Geneva Jews. Its limitation is toon that appears on Nov. 22 in the Kuwaiti AI- (3,128), Lau4anne 1,394), primarily that in order to Anba, showing the Arab's incredulity in the face Basel (2,071) and Bern maintain its overall of the list of disputes that are on the agenda of the (561). character, the SIG must Amman summit: first the inter-Arab disputes, and The Jewish population in strictly respect the au- only at the end does the conflict with Israel ap- Switzerland has remained tonomy of its member pear. That's how it has developed not only in the Middle East almost stationary in recent communities, their pri- years; the relative propor- vate interests and the but in the consideration of the area's problems by the West- ern worlds — that only under complusion is the role of tion of Jews in the general various religious trends. population is steadily de- Israel taken into consideration. The reason for founding creasing. Furthermore, the SIG in 1904 was to take Kurt Waldheim, when challenged on the issue, is apolo- getic, defensive, but never admits the totality of hatred for there are signs of aging whatever joint action was within the Jewish popula- possible to remove the Israel. The developed situation proves one point: the tion. specific prohibition against availability of Israel for scapegoatism. It doesn't matter The Schweizerischer Is- shekhita ( kosher slaughter- that Iran is fighting Iraq, that Lebanon is war-torn. Israel, raelitischer Geirieindebund ing) inserted in the Swiss unites the haters. Even the leader of the Lebanese Chris- (SIG), the Swiss Jewish Federal Constitution fol- tians, Major Saad Haddad, is ignored by all, including the Federation of communities, lowing a plebiscite in 1903. U.S. State Department, because his allies are the Israelis. is the all-embracing organ- In 1907, the Federal Court Such is the glory of modern-day statesmanship. ization of Jewish com- upheld a contention by the munities. The SIG fights Swiss Jewish Federation of Harold Urey, the Pacifist: anti-Semitism and other Communities that the pro- His Deep Interest in Technion forms of racial or religious hibition applied only to discrimination and quadropeds and did not Dr. Harold Urey, the Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, endeavors to promote better apply to the slaughter of who died Jan. 5 at the age of 87, was a pacifist and a friend By Philip Slomovitz Michigan State University Overseas Study Programs Merit Proper Communal Support A community like Metropolitan Detroit Jewry is sel- dom if ever without some kind of fund-raising campaign. Even in the midst of the major task to assure support for Israel and her institutions and the local and national agencies represented in the Allied Jewish Campaign, there are drives on the fringe. Priorities are never ignored. Therefore the appeals that are made for the universities and research projects in Israel, Bar-Ilan, Technion, Weizmann Institute, He' - - v University, Ben-Gurion, Tel Aviv and Haifa univen receive proper responses. While the burdens are great, there are occasional supplementary needs which must be provided for. It is discouraging to learn that the Michigan State University Overseas Study programs are affected by obsta- cles. The increased air fares, the inflationary costs and the expensive aspects of enrolling students in such study mis- sions are so serious that some portions of planned student missions to Israel already are being abandoned. It is in the interest of continuing such programs, their educational values, the training they provide in Jewish ranks for future leadership and among non-Jewish partici- pants for a closer relationship with Israel and Jewry, that the imperative need is to support such programming. Two of the Israeli aspects of this program are the Social Science Summer Term, conducted by Prof. Donald Gochberg, and an emphasis on the humanities, conducted by Prof. Jacob J. Climo. Unless student participation is subsidized, student participation may well be not only very difficult but nigh impossible. This is where community backing for the pro- gram becomes mandatory. Surely there are enough concerned individuals who will be willing to provide financial aid to supplement costs for interested students to participate in and assure the continuity of the Israel Overseas Study Programs at MSU. The appeal for such aid is especially vital in a statement by Thea Glicksman, an administrator of the MSU programs. The anthropological study tours have already been curtailed. It can be revived with proper assistance. The other programs should not be made to suffer. In spite of the great needs in other fields and the mul- tiplicity of fund-raising efforts, it is to be hoped that suffi- cient support will be given the Michigan State University study programs to assure their workability. Report on the Swiss Jewish Community Shows a Stationary and Aging Population poultry. Since 1926, the SIG has been the exclusive importer for kosher meat and is the administrator of distribu- tion quotas. A majority of the Swiss voted in a 1973 plebiscite on the revision of the Federal Constitution in favor of re- . placing the 1903 prohibi- tion of ritual slaughter with a general article for the pro- tection of animals. This would not have changed the situation as such, but it would have eliminated dis- crimination. However, in spite of re- peated efforts by the SIG, not even minimal conces- sions were made in the two houses of Parliament in the new 1977 law, al- though the economic interests of various groups, poultry factories for example, were given consideration. In a strongly worded state- ment, the SIG protested the hypocritical attitude that disregarded the reli- gious rights of a minority but yielded to economic pressure groups. The major problem of Swiss Jews is assimilation. In 1971, of each 100 Jewish men and women contract- ing marriage, there were 50 mixed marriages. In the non-Orthodox communities some of the youngsters who feel committed to Judaism go on aliya; the indifferent ones mostly keep aloof from community life. Swiss Jews are among the largest per capita con- tributors to the United Is_- rael Appeal. The sums col- lected for Israel far surpass the total amount of the budgets of the communities, the SIG, and the Jewish welfare organizations. Jewish education is given in the religion classes of the com- munities (two to 15 hours a week). Only the raelitische gionsgeselschaft" in Zurich has a Jewish day school. There is a chair of Judaism in Lucerne, and the library of the Zurich Jewish community is the most important Jewish li- brary in German in all Europe. It contains a cen- tral catalogue of all Judaica in Swiss libraries. There is a Jewish museum in Basel. There are two Jewish weekly news- papers: Israelitische Wochenblatt published in Zurich, and Judische Rundschau-Maccabi pub- lished in Basel. Both are in German and French.