18 Friday, January 8, 1982 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS' Emerald Dealers Plan Convention Heroic Poles Are Too Ready to Accept Anti-Semitism — JERUSALEM Emerald dealers are plan- ning a World-wide conven- tion in Israel in 1983. Emeralds produced in Israel . account for half the world's production. By VICTOR BIENSTOCK Henry Fairlie, a British journalist who makes his home in Washington and is a veteran observer of the world scene, has just per- formed a service for us in an whem there's wan HAND-PAINTED CUSTOM MURALS Children's Rooms Offices Homes NORI GEFFEN 356-3363 article in the Washington their history, under right- Post which should be re- wing and left-wing regimes, quired reading for all those one of the most anti-Semitic who see things only in ex- nations in Europe. treme shades of black and - "Just as Austria, even white and uncritically iden- with its Jewish com- tify with and accept at face munity shrunk to a few value anything that is de- thousands, is still anti- scribed as a liberation Semitic, so is anti- Semitism also strong in movement. "It is all very well sud- Poland with its Jewish denly to see the Poles as population also shrunk," heroes," writes Fairlie. "I Fairlie reminds us. am the last person to deny "When such hostility to a the recurring vitality that race of people persists, they keep on displaying in even in countries where their history. But they have there is not even a popu- never been, under right- lation to provoke it, one is wing or left-wing regimes, talking of a terrible evil very reliable defenders of against, which we dare n our guard." not let dow civil freedoms. Jew-hatred is endemic in "They have also been in Poland today as it has been for centures and it persists even though there are but a handful of Jews. Persecu- tion and pogrom. were the story of the Jews even in the Poland partitioned among foreign empires. Anti- Semitism flourished in Paderewski's republic, in Marshal Pilsudski's dic- tatorship and in Col. Beck's right-wing regime which collapsed in the first onslaughts of World War II. It was felt by many Jews conscripted into General Sikorski's army in the Soviet Union which was moved out to the Middle East in the later stages of the war. Its existence is a significant reason why only a handful of Jews were to be found in Poland after the war out of the three million who had called Poland their home. Of course there were Poles who did not share this feeling of anti-Semitism and who tried to shield their Jewish neighbors both from the Nazis and from home- grown pogromists. But, as the outcome shows, they were not many in number and relatively-unsuccessful in their efforts. By and large, the Poles were extremely suscepti- ble to incitement against the Jews and the Com- munist authorities after the war were as quick and adept in using anti, Semitism to divert dis- content from themselves SUN. 12 to 5 p.m. as their predecessors. Anti-Semitism was also a very useful weapon in the savage infighting that went on in the upper echelons of the party in Block's Year Endue Storewide Sale 20% to 60% Off Block's _ Clothes of West Bloomfield in the Orchard Mall on Orchard Lake Rood just 1/2 block north of Maple Rood • 851-9080 MON., TUE., WED., SAT. 10 to 6 p.m., THURS., FRI. 10 to 9 p.m. OVERWEIGHT? 1N•DEPTH Join Net CouRseatig Eat 3 Full Meals A nay - Plus Snacks LOSE! LOSE! LOSE! IT'S SAFE, SIMPLE & IT WORKS Visit any of our meetings without obligation and see the results for yourself LILY ANN GROSSMAN, Founder Director 548-7526 contemporary Poland as it had been in the Soviet Union when Josef Stalin destroyed his opponents and consolidated his autocratic power. There are possibly 6,000 Jews left in Poland, a coun- try of 35 million. Many of these are old and infirm and chose to remain in the coun- try which had been their lifelong home rather than to join the exodus in 1 968 when an anti-Semitic drive headed by Gen. Mieczyslaw Moczar — part of an up- heaval within the Com- munist leadership — forced most of the Jews remaining in post-war Poland to get out. Among Moczar's targets was Julius Katz-Suchy, a Jew who had served the Communists well as Polish Ambassador to the United Nations, a post in which he distinguished himself as a savage foe of the state of Is- rael. It is one of those little ironies to be found in the chronicles of every age that this man, who, if he had not been Jewish would have been execrated as a vicious anti-Semite, should have found his refuge in the Jewish state he had so bit- terly harassed. "The • anti-Jewish theme has been used re- peatedly in the political struggle in Communist Poland," according to a research report pub- lished a year ago by the Institute of Jewish Studies of the World Jewish Congress. Anti- Semitism, it noted, had surfaced in the party in- fighting in 1956 and again in 1967 when there was an anti-Jewish purge of the army, the security services and the state apparatus. A year later, the Com- munist regime initiated a major anti-Jewish cam- paign which forced the emigration of the great majority of the surviving Jews. Again in 1975 and 1976, the regime sought to deflect public ire over mounting prices with propaganda de- signed to convince the workers and peasants that the Jews were the cause of all the trouble. As the insti- tute report points out, this campaign resulted in the removal of most of the Jews from positions not only in the state and party appara- tus but also in the cultural and economic spheres. Anti-Semitism, although in a-quieter form, remained an official policy after 1978 because the Communists recognized its potential use-• fulness as an instrument to control the Polish public. In the past, Jews were singled out as Stalinists and allies of Zionism, and the objec- tive was not so much the masses as the members of the party itself. In the current crisis, however the purpose of the anti-Jewish prop- aganda is to discredit Sol- idarity, the workers' and peasants' movement - . which threatens the ,supremacy of the Polish Communist party. It seeks to accomplish this by portraying Solidarity as under the control of Jews who have in- sinuated themselves into positions of power and influence in the move- ment. (Nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson this week wrote that anti- Semitic leaflets are being sent to Poland by neo-Nazis in Sweden.) Since there aren't enou 0 Jews in Poland to be res - sible for all. the blackma - keting, food-hoarding and other deeds with which the Communist regime charges them, the Communist press warns that there are at least 100,000 Jews living in Poland who conceal their true identity under Polish names. All of Poland's eco- nomic woes are blamed on the machinations of these camouflaged Jews. Three or four Jews are known to sit in the high councils of Solidarity and to serve as advisers, particu- larly on economic issues, to Leach Walesa, the Solidar- ity leader. The Jaruzelski regime has gone to great lengths to exploit their role, to discredit Solidarity and shift the blame for Poland's economic plight from the corruption and misman- agement of Communist re- gimes to a Jewish conspi- racy. It's a procedure that has worked well and often in the past. "Anti-Semitism both feeds on and engenders no- tions of conspiracy," Fairlie points out. "In at least one of its aspects, anti-Semitism is an escape from complexity. All conspiracy theories are efforts to find tidy explana- tions of an untidy world. If . something goes awry somewhere in the world, someone, somewhere, must be issuing secret protocols. "Our politics are, day by day, being reduced to simple responses to situ- ations that are simply de- scribed. Anti-Semitism is a • simple explanation of anything that we find too complicated." But anti-Semitism is more than a threat to the Jews, Fairlie warns; it does not stop with the Jews. "Anti-Semitism is for the simple-minded a final solu- tion of any and every 'diffi- culty. If only it were only that. The bother is that it never stops there. It leads where it points and always in one direction. Not many steps beyond the mild anti- Semitic remark there is ways torture and mut tion and death. Not only for the Jew." Refugee Returns JERUSALEM (JNI) — Morris Cassouto, the newly-appointed director of the Israel Government Tourist Office in Cairo, left Egypt as a refugee in 1956. Cassouto will return to the city in which he lived and worked as an account- ant until forced to leave.