THE JEWISH NEWS
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PHILIP SLOMOVITZ
Editor and Publisher
CARMI M. SLOMOVITZ
Business Manager
HEIDI PRESS
Associate News-Editor
ALAN HITSKY
News Editor
DREW LIEBERWITZ
Advertising Manager
Sabbath Scriptural Selections
This Sabbath, the 22nd day of Iyar, 5742, the following scriptural selections will be read in our synagogues:
Pentateuchal portion, Leviticus 25:1-27:34.
Prophetical portion, Jeremiah 16:19-17:14.
Thursday, Yom Yerushalyim
Candlelighting, Friday, May 14, 8:26 p.m.
VOL. LXXI, No. 11
Page Four
Friday, May 14, 1982
`A HATER IS A MURDERER'
BIGOTED ARSONISTS
Thou shalt not hate
thy brother in thy heart.
—
Leviticus
Hatred takes on many forms. It is racial. Its
anti-Semitic tones have been universalized. It is
certainly irrational. It is always inhuman.
The bigoted opposition to the establishment
of homes for the retarded is a sample of the
inhumanity of man to man that is in evidence in
several areas in this community of Americans
who dare demonstrate their hatred in the
courts. Some have given vent to their meanness
with torches setting afire structures intended as
homes for the retarded. Such is the extent of
their actions which demand challenge from the
courts where judgments hopefully will firm on
the side of decency, rejecting any tolerance for
the brutal minds who would deny homes and
comfort, affection and decent treatment for the
less fortunate .
It is yet to be proven that the retarded who are
granted lawfully the right to be housed with
small groups of their kind in specially-
supervised homes have in any sense been harm-
ful to neighborhoods. The five homes now
supervised by the Jewish Association for Re-
tarded Citizens are exemplary. They have been
welcomed in the neighborhoods where they
exist. The residents are recognized as fellow
citizens. They are law abiding. They vote in
elections and express their views. They never
carry weapons. They work in the Jewish Voca-
tional Service workshops and produce to the
best of their abilities.
They are reminders of an indictment in the
Talmud that "A hater is a murderer!"
Some haters even carry the Bible with them
to the courts to demonstrate that they are de-
vout. They can't be as they hate and deny homes
and hypocritically recite the above quotation
from Leviticus.
What is needed is an uprising against such
hatred, such manifestations of bigotry. Let
there be a mobilization of effort to reject the
arsonists and haters in the midst of any com-
munity. The retarded are human beings who
are not to be denied the right to a decent way of
life. Whoever hates them or burns their homes
is a murderer!
The bigots who are degrading every symptom
of human decency have not limited their venom
to efforts to outlaw the just rights of fellow citi-
zens. They resorted to arson and their sick
minds are rooted in crimes. They have called
attention to a situation that cannot be ignored.
Their actions must also be the means of guid-
ing jurists who have hesitated in upholding the
state's regulations which provide for the legal
rights of retarded to homes legally protected.
When a judge states that he will need a year's
probation to prove the validity of such rights, he
merely encourages arsonists and crime provok-
ers.
The lessons are all-too-clear to need better
elaboration than has been provided by the out-
rages committed in Michigan _communities
whose peaceful status has been undermined and
whose actions must not be condoned in the
courts of law.
CHILDREN AS TARGETS
It is difficult to believe that the land whose
record under Nazism records the murder of
more than a million children continues to
tolerate spread of fear among children.
A report from Bonn, West Germany states
that Jewish school children, even those in kin-
dergartens, live in fear stemming from continu-
ing verbal attacks upon them.
The universities, according to the report, are
not immune from guilt, Jewish students there
also being subjected to humiliation.
How many children can there possibly be in
Germany, whose remaining 25,000 Jews are
mostly the elderly who live on pensions?
Apparently that does not matter. All that is
needed is one Jew,. and hatred will surface—
that being the legacy suffered from the anti-
Semitic terrors that have polluted the nations.
Germany especially has much to account for
when anti-Semitic outrages recur. The blame is
surely on a minority, and that makes the obliga-
tion of the majority all the more compelling — to
assure an end to all aspects of Nazism.
AVOIDING COMPLACENCY
Much as an editorial-writing optimist would
like to avoid resorting to the term "sur-
vivalism," it crops up.
It's on the agenda now with the warning by so
eminent a personality as the President of Israel,
Yitzhak Navon, that under current conditions
world Jewry could drop from its present 12 mil-
lion figure to eight million in the year 2000 and
to five million in 2015.
Attributed reasons are the increasing mixed
marriages and the assimilationist tendencies.
Undoubtedly, indifference to Jewish needs in
Jewish ranks is major as a reason for vanishing
numbers.
If, therefore, there is a complacency, it must
be abandoned. Indifference is criminal. Much
more concern must be given to the problem so
briefly touched upon in these few words.
Civet, Moynihan Expose
Venom of Anti-Zionism
Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, and the inhuman factors which
have given it ammunition for hate in many areas of the world has
found an effective foe in an escapee from the Nazi terror.
Jacques Givet throws light on the developing prejudices as they
gained ground after the Six-Day War of June 1967, in which Israel
triumphed over the superior Arab forCes, in his French-published
"The Anti-Zionist Complex," in SBS Publishers' English translation-.
Born in Moscow in 1917, Givet spent an emigre childhood even-
tually settling with his family in France. He served with the French
Army during World War II and later played a distinguished role in
the Resistance. Arrested by the Gestapo on D-Day, he escaped death
in the gas chamber — a fate which was to engulf his entire family —
by jumping from a prison train.
After the liberation of Paris, in which he took part, Givet was
decorated and became an adviser to the French government on refu-
gees and related matters. He and his wife, who is the diplomatic
correspondent for a leading Paris newspaper, have three children, one
of whom is on the staff of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology.
Givet is the author of several volumes of French poetry and
political thought.
He shows how the emerging anti-Semitism stemming from the
anti-Zionist ranks is akin to the vilest in medievalism.
This is supplemented by an equally excoriating essay by U.S.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who, in an introduction to "The
Anti-Zionist Complex," condemns the hatred as "vulgar and blatant,"
especially as he witnessed its rise when he was chief U.S. delegate to
the United Nations.
Dealing with lack of understanding of the issues by Jews them- -
selves, and providing guidelines to correct these shortcomings, Givet
declares that "oppressed minorities can achieve true universalism
only by affirming their own personalities and not by attempting to
deny them." It is his way of emphasizing the significance of Jews
having attained control of their own destinies through the statehood
of Israel.
He expresses a call to Jews, themselves to be firm in defense of the
Jewish position, declaring:
"Am I exaggerating? Perhaps. Possibly the ups-and-downs in
Jewish history have been no more than accidents. As a Jew, part of me
maintains an uneasy vigilance, and part is dominated by the urge to
forget. This latter part would like nothing so much as to surrender to
that confident optimism without which, certainly, life is much grim-
mer.
"But I am taking a risk if I yield to the temptation and slack, iy
vigilance. It is therefore criminal on the part of those who stand on the
sidelines to urge me to drop my guard, for the result — for me and
other Jews like me — might be death. Those who claim to be objective,
and can afford this luxury — let them take their cue from Baghdad or
Moscow, and tell me who will step in to prevent the deaths of Jews
next time.
"Who, if not ourselves, in the only way open to us. Thanks to
`structures' — simultaneously living and indestructible."
In the Moynihan essay there is a shocking revelation of the
manner in which the campaign against Zionism has become an anti-
Semitic task in the Soviet Union,. He points to a Russian magazine for
children ages 9-14, which is packed with venom. He quotes from the
youth magazine, called the Pionerskaya Pravda, to show the extent of
the poisonous propaganda.
Thus, in its totality, Givet's "The Anti-Zionist Complex" emerges
as a weapon against anti-Semitism, as an expose of the haters of
Zionism, as an appeal for humanism — all indicating that the book
should be a text not for Jews alone but for all peoples.