12 Friday, April 20, 1984 THE DETROIT JEVVISil NEWS PURELY COMMENTARY FRESH AIR SOCIETY'S STEVEN EPSTEIN Canadian Wilderness Trips - 9th to 11th grades Kayaking, mountaineering, sailing, tripping, swimming Continued from Page 2 I Love You Eastern Teen Trip - 10th to 11th grades New Hampshire, Maine, New Brunswick, Quebec City, Montreal Thank You For Israel Teen Mission - completing 11th and 12th grades 38 days with 22 days touring Jerusalem, Eilat, Tel Aviv, the Galilee Joint program with Israeli Teens THE PARTY. Camp Kennedy - 10th to 11th grades Sail, Swim, Waterski - a place to call your own Love Western Teen Trips - 10th to 12th grades NANCE Call 661-0600 for brochure of these programs and Camp Tamarack and Camp Maas. Scholarships are available to qualifying families. Want to feel wonderful? Call the Jewish Association for Retarded Citizens today for your copy of JARC's Wish Book. You can honor loved ones, or celebrate special occasions with selections from the book. To order your Wish Book, or to make contributions, call or write: 24252 Southfield Road Suite 207 Southfield, Michigan 48075 557-7650 Call or write today. You'll feel wonderful. DIAMONDS our specialty Over three generations of service, value, confidence & professionalism LAWRENCE M ALLAN President Established 1919 30400 Telegraph Rd. Birmingham, MI 48010 Suite 104/134 AWARDED CERTIFICATE BY GIA IN GRADING & EVALUATION. GEMOLOGIST/DIAMONTOLOGIST Nrt fer actual replicas of their homes and factories — indeed rough replicas of their very existences. And something intangible also transferred with the German Jews during those years. It had nothing to do with concrete or cash accounts and had everything to do with culture. A German fondness for music, for art, for spotless homes, for cafes with chocolate tortes, for philosophy, for antiquities, for theater, for the finer things that struggling Palestine had never stopped to de- velop. These intangibles were transferred like ev- erything else. After World War II, when hundreds of thousands of Jews from a dozen different nations wandered through Europe stateless and dis- placed, each Jew a remnant of a family, a town or a ghetto, all ravaged survivors without homes and without lives to return to, after the Holocaust, when the moment of the in-gathering of the exiles was at hand, Israel was ready. A nation was wait- ing. Fifteen years earlier, it hadn't existed. Fifteen years earlier few could have visualized what was to come, what was to be. But a small group of men did. They foresaw it all. That's why nothing would stop them; no force was too great to overcome. These men were the creators of Israel. And in order to do so, each had to touch his hand to the most controversial undertaking in Jewish history — the transfer agreement. It made a state. Was it madness, or was it genius? Such was the controv- ersial development that in- volved heartache, ending with an element of glory born out of misery for those who were rescued in the process. There are many supplementary occurrences which could serve as addenda to the record saved by Black in The Transfer Agreement. One item, understandably not men- tioned in his book because it could have been among many more related experi- ences, was the reaction of DorOthy Thompson people like Dorothy Thompson. For many years she was a supporter of the Zionist movement. She appeared on Zionist platforms. Then she became a violent antagonist. Could it have been the transfer agreement? She charged that Zionists were more interested in building a Jewish National Home than in rescuing Jews from Nazism. Meyer Weisgal was among her closest friends and he maintained that she was ready, before her death, to express regret over her negativism toward Zionism, but it was too late. It is evident, therefore, that no matter how controver- sial Edwin Black's Transfer Agreement may prove, regard- less of the bitterness it may arouse, the facts are on the record. Surely, Black's concluding explanatory note gives substance to what could have been judged as realism in the era of that tragic agreement. The recorded historic events relegate Black's book to the most significant relating to Zionist history, the redemp- tion of Israel into Jewish statehood as well as the controv- ersial experiences that involved Jewish leadership in con- flicts of nations — specifically the United States — during the years of the Holocaust. E Phone: 642-5575 "Retail courtesies at Wholesale Prices" Daily tit 5:30 Thurs. til 8:30, Sat. til 5 The Jewish Braille Institute of America has funded a low vision clinic at the Tel Aviv Medical Center. Here clinic director Dr. Max Popper tests a patient for visual acuity while she wears telescopic lenses.-