2 Friday, December 2, 1983 THE DETROIT JEWISH` NEWS Purely Commentary Eschatology to the Rescue: How 'The Day After' Could Be Theologically Delineated Producers of the would-be terrifying The Day After" overlooked a basic factor in facing up to the Final Judg- ment. The eschatological visions predated the televised adherence to the realities of nuclear threats. There is the religious factor, the belief in the end of all things — how else can there be Resurrection? - The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia was blessed to have as one of its editors a Reform Jewish cleric who went deeply into the subject. Dr. Simon Cohen thus defined Es- chatology: Eschatology as a Lesson Judging 'The Day After' . U.S. Department of Justice Doesn't Play Games and Martyrdom for Trifa Is a Poor Falsification that is more vital in search for continuity, much more than an end to the matter that affects the human. Therefore, perhaps the children who were advised not to watch "The Day After" have an answer to the warnings as televised. Those who did included many who judged it as another television horror play. Perhaps there are too many of them already. Demjanjuk and Trifa: U.S. Justice Unabated for Accused Nazi Villains John Demjanjuk has provided his $60,000 home in Cleveland as bail pending his appeal from a U.S. Justice Department order before he is sent to stand trial in Israel as a participant in the mass murder of Jews as a Nazi col- laborator. It is evident that the Justice Department is not playing games with Nazi criminals who lied in their appli- cations for U.S. citizenship. Such also was the order for the deportation of the Michigan-oriented anti-Semite Valerian Trifa who under- standably finds it difficult to find a haven of refuge and There is evidence of thorough coverage and responsible therefore still eludes deportation orders. The latest reports research in the Simon Cohen essay in which the scholarly are that time is running out for him and that he either must author stated: find "a host" or be deported to Romania where he commit- The eschatological viewpoint appears in cer- ted the crimes he is charged with. tain parts of the Bible (Isaiah 24-27; Daniel 12; Assuring justice in a U.S. decision, by court action, is Zechariah 4; Joel 3 and 4), in apocalyptic litera- one thing; glorifying him and thereby falsifying records is ture, and in numerous allusions in the talmudic another. The decision for his deportation, agreed to in Fed- literature. It varies as to detail, according to the eral Court in Detroit, was a result of proof of his criminality nature of the individual writer. provided in the 30-year-old pursuit of justice by Dr. Charles Thus sometimes it is Israel alone, sometimes Kremer and many who associated with him in gathering the righteous of all nations who are eventually the evidence against Trifa. triumphant; the nature of the Messiah is variously Nevertheless, Detroit's afternoon newspaper found it described; and the state of the souls after death necessary to portray a saint in an article prominently fea- prior to the final resurrection and judgment is tured in the Sunday magazine section under the title "The variously depicted. Man Without a Country." Just as Trifa's church was misled The general ideas of the future hope, how- into granting him sainthood, so also a responsible news- ever, are fairly uniform, as follows: The state of paper found it necessary to display Trifa as a martyr. Ac- the world will become progressively worse as cording to that article, one would judge that the comforting time goes on, culminating in great wars, of which of Nazism and Hitler-formed criminality was not by one the most striking will be that of Gog and Magog, Valerian Trifa who also already stands condemned by his and in pestilence, famine and earthquakes. Then native country, Romania. God will intervene, either in person, or through The shock created by an article martyrizing an admit- the Messiah (sometimes there are two Messiahs, ted associate of one of the vilest groups whose members the first of whom will die), and there will be a great were responsible for wholesale massacres of Romanian battle in which the wicked nations will be de- Jews elicited outrage and protests. In the Nov. 27 Detroit stroyed. News Michigan weekly magazine section, a month after All mankind will perish; but then will come the appearance of the misleading original glorifying Trifa, the resurrection of the dead, and all will be sum- appeared factual presentations, with resentment for the moned before the throne of God for judgment. The martyr-creating article. wicked will be annihilated; the righteous will live The responses were written by Peter Alter, president, in the new Jerusalem, and enjoy the bliss of the Anti-Defamation League of Bnai Brith for Michitaii; David world to come." Such, in main outline, is the ebenbom, president, Jewish Community Council of Met- teaching of eschatology as expressed in the opolitan Detroit; Steven Weiss of Southfield; and Brian Judaism of the post-exilic and talmudic period. chill of Detroit. Because Eschatology is an augury of the End of Days, If ever anger was justified, it was in Weiss' letter. If of the erasing of mankind and the anticipation of Resurrec- e ver facts spoke bluntly and inhumanity was excoriated, tion, there is almost like an invitation to it in the ABC w hile a newspaper's blunder was exposed, it was in the horror drama "The Day After." It need not, theocratically, A lter-Lebenbom condemnations of a piece that could even be ascribed only to the ultra-Orthodox and the Fundamen- b e branded anti-American as well as inhuman. talists. The author of the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia essay dealt with his definition in the role of a Reform rabbi. re There must have been many more messages, also with sentment of the manner in which the man who primarily Yet, even as a Reform adherent, he appended to his defini- co nducted the campaign to expose Trifa, Dr. Charles Kre- Lion a Reform prayer which could be utilized eschatologi- m er, was treated in an article falsifying the Trifa record. Of tally. Rabbi Simon Cohen states as he concludes his essay: sp ecial interest is a descriptive letter by Mrs. Myron (Ida) Throughout the Middle Ages these teachings oyrich, whose letter was among those ignored. Mrs. were a part of the fundamental creed of Judaism. oyrich, herself a survivor of the Nazi terror, wrote a com- Thus the 11th article of the creed of Maimonides endable essay stating the facts in a vital cast. Here is the expresses the belief in reward and punishment in co mplete text of her ignored letter: ESCHATOLOGY, the doctrine of last things; in particular, teachings about the end of the world and of the state of the soul after death. It is com- posed of doctrines about such subjects as the coming of the Messiah, the tribulations that will befall humanity as the result of wickedness, the final redemption, the last judgment, immorality, resurrection, heaven and hell. " the world to come, the 12th the hope for the com- ing of the Messiah, and the 13th the expectation of the resurrection of the dead. This is still the view of the future held by Orthodox Jews. Liberal Jews have stripped the doctrine of eschatology of its supernatural elements, but still retain the hope that a future golden age will cor- rect the imperfections of present life. The "Union Prayer Book," in a recasting of a prayer first ut- tered by Abba Aricha (Rab) in the Third Century CE, expresses this hope at every single service: "We fervently pray that the day may come when all men shall invoke Thy name, when cor- ruption and evil shall give way to purity and goodness, when superstition shall no longer en- slave the mind ; nor idolatry blind the eye, when all inhabitants of the earth shall know that to Thee alone every knee must bend and every ton- gue give homage. "0 may all, created in Thine image, recognize that they are brethren, so that, one in spirit and one in fellowship, they may be forever united be- fore Thee. Then shall Thy kingdom be established on earth and the word of Thine ancient seer be fulfilled. The Lord will reign forever and ever. On that day the Lord shall be One and His name shall be One." Therefore, it is still the week and the month before Justice demands a reply to the analysis in your magazine of Bishop Trifa with its references to his "soft blue eyes" and "soft hands," and the concluSion that he is a "victim of history." I sat every day in the first row of the cour- troom in Detroit, as the government began pre- senting its case, and I too was overwhelmed by those eyes — but to me they glistened of steel and hatred, particularly as they stared at what had become "the Jewish side" of the courtroom. Un- fortunately, this side was also filled with ghosts, ghosts who still haunt me and others like me each night — the victims who are still asking for justice. It is in their name that I feel compelled to bring the following to the attention of your readers. First, lets look at the background of this man, so piously, described by your correspondent. Viorel Trifa was a theological student, who by 1936 became a full time legionnaire. He was presi- dent of the National Union of Christian Romanian Students and leader of the Iron Guard Student movement, the combat arm of the Legion of Ar- changel Michael, a mystical fascist movement. The Iron Guard legionnaires were the Romanian equivalent of Hitler's "brownshirts" and so rec- ognized by the U.S. government. Howard Blum, former N.Y. Times correspon- By Philip Slomovitz dent, writes in his book "Wanted!" that as early as 1936 at a legion congress in Targu-Mures, Trifa spoke in support of a Guardist "death com- mando" squad that would liquidate "Jews and other enemies of the state." Following the speech on Jan. 20, 1941 referred to in your article, which initiated the pogrom, cor- respondent Leigh White in a report datelined Sofia, Jan. 29, 1941, gives an exact account of the slaughter and lists the "general staff which or- dered the massacre." The third name listed is that of "Viorel Trifa, leader of the frenetic Greenshirt student movement." Raul Hilberg, drawing on interviews with eyewitnesses wrote in "The Destruction of the European Jews": "Iron Guardists had stormed into the Jewish quarter, burning down synagogues, demolishing stores and devastating private apartments . . . In the city itself, the Ger- man military attache was busy collecting casualty reports. 'In the Bucharest morgue' he wrote, 'one can see hundreds of corpses, but they are mostly Jews' . . . In the morgue, bodies were observed hanging like carcasses of cattle. A witness saw a girl of five hanging by her feet just like a calf, but her entire body smeared with blood." When the war ended, Trifa por- - frayed himself a vic- tim of Nazi persecu- tion and sought asylum in Italy. There, though still a layman, he found a position teaching his- tory at a Catholic col- lege. On July 19, 1950, Trifa arrived in New York. Blum recounts how Immigration Examiner Leo M. Ja- remko asked, "Did IDA jOYRICH you ever make any speeches or give any lectures that might be con- strued as being anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic?" Trifa replied, "No, I cannot say. I don't believe so." The examiner then asked if Trifa had ever been a member of the Iron Guard. "No," Trifa answered flatly. Blum further describes the takeover of the Romanian Orthodox Episcopate in Grass Lake, Michigan as a military operation. First the phone lines were cut, then a barrage of rocks and finally the seizure of the Vatra. The Reverend Vasile Pascau who had been at the Vatra during the assault later wrote: "A group of Iron Guard hood- lums ... invaded our property . . . beating an old priest . . . creating terror . ." And so a layman, Viorel Trifa, became BiShop Valerian Trifa. Before World War II, Romania was the largest Jewish community in Europe, numbering over 800,000 By the end of the war it was reduced to 300,000 survivors. There are few Romanian Jews, if any who did not lose members of their im- mediate families in the slaughter. Many are eye- witnesses of Trifa's role. I find it amusing to read in your paper Trifa's attorney's statement that "the government's case was much less than airtight." It was just before the government was to produce its second witness (she was already seated in the courtroom), a New Jersey woman whose father was killed in the 1941 massacre that Trifa proposed his "deal" to the government. In a press conference held in De- troit's Federal Building immediately after, Allan A. Ryan, Jr. the director of the government's Of- fice of Special Investigations, outlined the depth of the government's case, in which he was pre- pared with eye-witnesses, taped depositions, hand-writing experts, Romanian newspapers of the time and cartoons full of documents. "It was the immensity of our evidence that precipitated this conclusion," said Ryan as he recounted being approached by Trifa's lawyers. In his final paragraphs, your reporter says ". . . it all comes down to the bishop and the dentist . . ." With all respect to Dr. Kramer, who has given half of his life to this cause, that is not so — it all comes down to the bishop and justice. It is unfortunate that the truth must be sought in this fashion, by its publication in these columns. But facts are facts and will not be hidden into a Nazi-protected closet. Truth is truth and just as the U.S. Department of Justice is not planning games in such cases the evidence must be proclaimed. That's the purpose of this unusual resort of presenting facts which a journalistic confrere has ignored.