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Friday, May 18, 1984

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

PURELY COMMENTARY

PHILIP SLOMOVITZ

Holocaust memorials:
new issue on agenda

Her Zionist career
really began when she
joined her father on all his
worldwide tours in behalf of
the movement. Nahum
Sokolow was diabetic and
needed constant care for the
protection of his health and
Celina became her father's
personal physician.
She accompanied him
to Detroit in the early 1920s
and watched over him, ac-
companying him to the pub-
lic meetings he addressed
and the conferences he had
with Jewish leaders.
Recollections of a
week's visit to Detroit by
Nahum and Celina Sokolow
Dr. Celia Sokolow
include his address to the
Detroit District of the Zionist Organization of America at
the dinner held in the basement social hall of Cong.
Shaarey Zedek, then located on Willis and Brush. With the
executive director of the local ZOA in those years, Jacob
Miller, the planned meals were at the then popular Josef s
Restaurant on Woodward and Montcalm in downtown De-
troit.
The Sokolow memories are unforgettable. Dr. Celina
Sokolow contributed immensely to her family's chapter in
Jewish history.

Now that numerous memorials to the Holocaust and
its victims are being planned, both on a local scale as well as
in communities throughout the land, the wisdom of con-
structing them is being questioned.
Especially in reference to the vast project planned in
the nation's capital, the very idea is being ridiculed by some
and judged as unnecessary by others.
Exemplary criticism appeared in a letter to the editor
of the New York Times. A survivor from Nazism, L.T.
Sandor, now residing in New York, expressed these views:
The establishment of a Holocaust memorial in
Washington is unnecessary, misguided and a
waste of resources.
Israel exists to a great extent because of the
Holocaust, whose survivors (of which I am one)
demanded it, populated it and fought for it in 1948
and thereafter. The gas chambers of the Nazi
camps and the squalor of the DP camps pressured
the conscience of the nations to vote for its estab-
lishment. Israel is the memorial, and Yad Vashem,
the Holocaust Memorial Authority, its "Tomb of
the Unknown Soldier," on the proper site in
Jerusalem.
By contrast, a museum "to show the dark side
of human civilization" and the "inhumanity of the
killer, but also the humanity of the victim" in the
capital of a country that is neither of the killers
nor of the victims is but an empty gesture.
While no memorials exist in Washington to the
many victims of other mass atrocities in long-past
and recent history, this gesture could and would
be misunderstood and conceived to be
presumptuous and an irritant by those not
memorialized.

The 'guilt' and the hush-hush
accusations and Argentine
Jewry's reply to Timerman

A Washington memorial would surely not at-
tract large crowds of those who need its
education, but there would probably be frequent
visits by hate sloganeers and graffiti and swastika
painters. And it would divert effort and funds
from the existing memorials, Israel and Yad Vas-
hem.

The planned national Holocaust Memorial has become
a U.S. commitment. President Reagan hailed it. Members
of Congress endorsed it. Except for a few latter-day defec-
tors, the national Jewish committee headed by Elie Wiesel
contains the names of very prominent Jews and Christians.
It is difficult to believe, therefore, that anyone would have
the daring audacity to suggest the abandonment of the
project. The developing dispute over the necessity for such a
museum is certain to create embarrassments and may
arouse renewed prejudices, yet the only conceivable obsta-
cle to the completion of the project might be delays in
formulating it.
This is not all there is to the disputable factors about
Holocaust memorials. Some are being planned at great
expense. The Holocaust Memorial Center in West Bloom-
field is major among the projects. It is scheduled to be ready
for viewing within a few months. Some had previously
questioned the need for it. Now it must be treated as a
reality.
Therefore, it is vital that the resultant project should
serve numerous purposes. While perpetuating theZahor —
Remember! — obligation it can be an educational medium
for Jews and non-Jews to study the history of human ex-
perience which permitted a Holocaust, and the dissemina-
tion df knowledge about mankind's higher aims for an
assured, genuine, civilized society.
What has been done is inerasable, and it must adhere
to the basic principles which motivated Holocaust center-
ing.

.

Sokolow memories revived
in the record chronicled
by feminist Celia Sokolow

Celina Sokolow earned a place among the early
feminists. She was among the pioneering women who
earned medical degrees. Her leadership in women's Zionist
ranks was an inspiration for men as well as women in world
Zionist functioning.
Her death May 3 at the age of 98 served as a remin-
der of the distinctions attached to the name Sokolow. Her
father, Nahum Sokolow, was one of the most distinguished
editors of Hebrew and Yiddish publications in the first
decades of this century. She earned her medical degree as a
student in Switzerland during World War I, 80 years ago.

An older generation is not alone in the testing of the
"guilt'rthat is being laid at the doors of the witnesses to the
Holocaust. The generation of the 1930s and 1940s is ac-
cused of having failed to speak out in protest against the
atrocities and of having weakly submitted to the curse of
Nazism. The verdict has been pronounced many times
since, yet there is a commission, presided over by former
Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, whose members
are still in the process of testing and judging the past
events.
A later generation, this
time the dominant Latin
American Jewish commu-
nity of Argentina, also
stands accused of having
failed to act against the ter-
rors in that country. Argen-
tine Jewry has been accused
by one of its most famous
personalities, Jacobo
Timerman, of failure to
speak out against the at-
rocities, the kidnappings,
the tortures.
Timerman, himself a
survivor from the Argen-
tine terror, an escapee from
the horror who found refuge
Jacobo Timerman
in Israel and became one of
Israel's most vindictive commentators, especially in rela-
tion to the Beirut tragedies, penned major attacks against
his former fellow Argentine Jews in many articles and
especially a most drastic one in the New York Times. That
elicited a response from a spokesman for DATA, the official
Argentine Jewish organization. Nejemias Resnizky's
lengthy letter published by the NYTimes, deals with the
Timerman accusations, point by point, and makes these
claims in defense of DATA and Argentine Jewish leader-
ship:
As president of the Delegation of Jewish
Associations of Argentina (DAIA), from 1973 to
1980, I would like to respond to Jacobo Timer-
man's charges of passivity on the part of the lead-
ers of the Jewish community during the repres-
sion by the Argentine military regime.
On March 20, 1984, in a hearing before the
National Commission on Disappeared Persons, at
which the Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato
presided, the board of the DAIA presented a dos-
sier containing documentation in support of the
board's efforts in defense of Jewish honor and
dignity. I shall briefly cite some facts mentioned
in that dossier:
(1) From the beginning of the repression, the
Jewish community was the only one to file before
the government lists of detainees and disap-
peared, demanding their liberty and return.

(2) The Jewish community was the only one to
appoint a representative, Rabbi Roberto Graetz,
to the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights, the
main organization that defended human rights in
Argentina during the years of repression.
(3) In statements published in Mundo lsraelita
on March 16, 1979, and in Nueva Presencia on
March 17, 1979, we denounced the maltreatment
of Jews, and we repeated these charges before the
human rights commission of the Organization of
American States.
(4) When Nazi groups tried in April 1977 to use
the "Graiver case" to start an anti-Semitic c
paign, the DAIA publicly exposed the "dark
romist forces" at work and emphatically stated
that "there will never again be passive or silent
Jews." In the same declaration, we demanded
freedom for Jacobo Timerman, and this remained
our unceasing concern until his release. The
forceful portions of this declaration were printed
in the New York Times on May 15, 1977, and, sur-
prisingly, in Timerman's paper, La Opinion, on
May 10, 1977, before its seizure.
(5) The DAIA w s successful in its request to
have rabbis visit Jewish detainees in jail.
(6) During the repression, the DAIA was in-
strumental in the closing of the Nazi publishing
houses Milica and Odal.
During this period of hardship; there was, in-
deed, terror and ambiguity, but not on the part of
the DAIA leadership.
We regret the confusion that remains among
some of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo regard-
ing the Jewish community and the DAIA but we
feel that when they learn of the evidence submit-
ted to the National Commission on Disappeared
Persons, they will realize that people who do not
have the mothers' feelings at heart are trying to
take advantage of their grief.
The May 6 "Sixty Minutes" CBS program, devoted to
exposing the kidnappings and crimes by the recently de-
feated, terrorizing Argentine administration, challenged
this defense to a degree. It endorsed in some measure the
charge the Jewish leadership failed to condemn the out-
rages of an administraiton that had mainly anti-
Communist aims and persecuted whoever it chose to brand
with the Communist label.
Jacobo Timerman may have much more to say on the
subject. The defensive resorted to by Argentine Jewish
spokesmen may not satisfy him and his fellow accusers.
Nevertheless, the official Jewish viewpoint cannot be ig-
nored. It was uttered and merits consideration in discuss-
ing the issues involving the rejection of "Sha-Sha" methods
when confronting menacing situations in Jewish life, or
whenever vigilance is called for to reply to terrorism or in
efforts to prevent it.
The discussion of the issue presently on the calendar
should serve as a guideline, admonishing leadership that
hush-hush policies have no place in a democratized Jewish
society.

a

Dissent as a normalcy
in total Jewish experience

Saul Bellow had a truly challenging statement, in the
interview by J.R. Bruckner, editor of the New York Times
Book Review section (April 15), when he stated:
"How could I be anything but a dissenter? Who wants
the opinion of a group?"
That's speaking volumes in what could be called a
summary in a thought-provoking declaration by a Nobel
Prize winner in literature.
What Bellow expressed applies to the total human
experience. There is a vital aspect in what he said to his
interviewer. In "Candid Talk With Saul Bellow," he is
quoted:
In a faded image from 19th Century Russia
his mother's father, a Biblical scholar with lo -
curls and a beard, looks out with eyes that
exactly Bellow's. His father and some business
associates appear in an early 20th Century photo-
graph in St. Petersburg. A post-World War I
photograph taken in Lachine, Quebec, where Be-
llow was born, shows his parents, his brothers
and sister and a small Saul Bellow with almost
twice as much hair as head.
Then the family appears in a 1920s Chicago
photograph. In the pictures you can almost see an
ancient style disappearing while the original im-
print remains.
Bellow studied Hebrew before he started
school and could read the Hebrew scriptures be-
fore he was seven. "I still do," he says. "My mother

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