30 Friday, May 11, 1984 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS CAMP MAAS NEWS ORTOHVILLE Fresh Air Society's Experts hit 1984 'Passion Play' Exciting Resident Camp Programs • • • • boys & girls entering the 6th thru 10th grades bunk activities individual choice activities all-camp events on Jewish themes computers, horseback riding, video taping, sailing, photography, aerobic dance, sports, ceramics, swimming, crafts, tennis, hiking/canoe trips. Separate Sports Skills Camp, Dance Village, Post Camp, Computer Camp, Post Camp Horseback Riding Ranch. Call 661-0600 for brochure on this camped Camp Tamarack, Teen Travel Trips, Camp Kennedy. Scholarships are available for qualifying families. HARRY THOMAS EXTRA-SPECIAL SALE! A Fine Group Of Nationally Advertised Hand Tailored SUIT6 -*fo Oscar De La Renta — Vincent Sorry* - ..,essini — Tino Morelli Regularly up to $375 NOW ONLY $ 1895 0 & $2095° SPORT COATS NOW ONLY $895° SLACKS Values up to $175 Regularly $39.50 to $69.50 NOW ONLY $ 2450 $2950 $3950 HARRY THOMAS Fine Clothes For Fifty Years 24750 Telegraph at 10 Mile Next to Dunkin' Donuts Daily to 6 SUNDAY 11-3 BY ARNOLD AGES Toronto (JTA) — A Jewish historian and a Jewish philosopher are both highly critical of the 1984 version of Passion Play which will be staged this summer in the West Ger- man village of Oberammer- gau. It will mark the 350th anniversary of the first production of the play by the villagers. Ever since 1634, the people of Oberammergau in Bavaria have kept a prom- ise made at the time when their village was threatened by a plague "to keep the tragedy of the pas- sion (of Jesus) every 10 years." The dominant theme of the play has not been that the evil Jews crucified Jesus. Saul Friedman, professor of history at Youngstown (Ohio) State University, the author of No Hope for t'e Oppressed and Pogror--:hik , and the author of soon to be released bookon thePas- sion Play. ...s the play, which ;. expected to be seen by lore than 500,000 spec- Lators this summer, will be substantially the same ver- sion presented in the village in 1980. "On the scale of anti- Semitism, where Der Sturmer is 100 and the Sermon on the Mount is 0, I would say the 1980 play at 40," Friedman says. "But it is much improved over 1970 where the text was 70 in anti-Semitism." While Friedman is not to- tally satisfied with the new expurgated version of the play — which tends to por- tray Jews as the people of Judas, rather than Jesus — he says that many of the improvements came about r\f_titc, crrInd will of gau. That good will has not gone far enough, however, he observes, since there are still distinctly anti-Jewish resonances in the latest ver- sion. Friedman indicates that the village's former mayor, Ernst Zwink, one of the most helpful forces in the purging of the original text, has died and his death has removed some of the urgency of the text's re- vision. In a preface to Friedman's new book, Obergammergau, philosopher Emil Fac- kenheim, a professor at the Institute for Contemporary Jewish Studies, says that the 1934 version of the play belies the assertion made by many defenders of Oberammergau that Nazism never really pene- trated the play. He states: "We say the 1934 Nazi version because, contrary to all the apologies offered after 1945, to the effect that Nazism never penetrated Oberammergau, the spirit Emile Fackenheim of Nazism is unmist-i(ablY present in the F icture of money-greed)' plotting, bloodthin-?'Y Jews, coupled nea tfr with the claim that n ,,v, anno 1934, Christians are redeemed from them and their machinations." Fackenheim concedes that the 1980 "cleaned up" version (which will be the text offered this summer) has eliminated some of the more "overtly offensive ex- pressions and ideas." But both Friedman and Fac- kenheim concur in their assessment of the real prob- lem with the Oberammer- gau spectacle. The play shows no evidence of what Fackenheim calls "a fun- damental metanoia." This term has been inadequately translated in English as "repentance." Fackenheim says in his preface: "The 1934 version of the Oberammergau damns the Jews explicitly. In the 1980 version this damnation is still implicitly present." In his book, Friedman identified no less than eight clearly anti-Jewish stereotypes found in the aricious money-ienaers, vengeful opponents of Jesus, spiteful rabbis and pharisees, and Jewish mobs shrieking for blood. Friedman also reports in his book that in discussions with Catholic theologians, he was told that it takes time for reconsiderations about Jewish culpability to be reflected in the popular consciousness. The result of the Second Vatican Council in 1962 has not yet succeeded in reaching to- tally the Oberammergau phenomenon. In his preface, Fac- kenheim scores this apolo- getic tendency. "Just how long will it take for ,the or- dinary Christian or German to take notice. And in the meantime, are new seeds of the old hatred being sown, for some future explosion — and a new catastrophe for Christianity, no less than for Judaism and the Jewish people?" Fackenheim identifies one Catholic theologian in Germany who has spoken out on the need for Germans to realize what they have done to their Jewish citi- zens, Johann Baptist Metz. Even after the war, Metz said that the Jews remained a vague cliche and that one's views were derived at best from Oberammergau." Christians must at long last listen to Jews. says Metz. "This moral recollec- tion of the persecution of the Jews touches lastly the re- lation of the people of this country to the state of Is- r poi. In this respect we have no choice, and I insist in this point over against my leftist friends," Metz declares. "After the Jews were car- ried in our most recent his- tory to the brink of total an- nihilation, we should be the last people in the world to accuse Jews of an excessive desire for security. "We should be the very first to claim that they de- fend their state, not because of "Zionist imperialism" but rather as a "house against death," as the very last place of refuge of a people persecuted for centuries." Fackenheim concludes his preface to Friedman's new book on Oberammer- gau by suggesting that it is doubtful whether the play could really survive the kind of metanoia or repen- tance demanded by theolo- gians such as Metz. The only possibility for the sur- vival of the play, says Fac- kenheim, is if the following words of Metz are heeded: "We Christians will never get back behind Auschwitz. And we will get beyond it, not alone and by ourselves, togetherness but ofh6lL rii pntirn • Nun urges boycott of play A Toronto (JTA) Catholic nun is urging people not to go to the West German village of Oberammergau in Bavaria this summer to see the Pas- sion Play. "To go would be to participate in a play more of prejudice than of piety," Sis- ter Mary Jo Leddy of To- ronto wrote in a column re- cently in the Toronto Star. Oberammergau "has be- come a place of prejudice rather than of piety," she wrote. "Why? Because of the anti-Semitic content of the play produced there. Hitler himself recog- nized this. The play was a favorite of his. He believed the drama pro- vided the religious under- pinning of his racist anti,], Jewish policies."