4 Friday, June 1, 1984

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

THE JEWISH NEWS

Serving Detroit's Metropolitan Jewish Community
with distinction for four decades.
Editorial and Sales offices at 17515 West Nine Mile Road,
Suite 865 Southfield, Michigan 48075-4491
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EDITOR: Gary Rosenblatt
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NEWS EDITOR: Alan Hitsky
LOCAL NEWS EDITOR: Heidi Press
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Ellen Wolfe

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Seymour Schwartz

PRODUCTION:
Donald Cheshure
Cathy Ciccone
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© 1984 by The Detroit Jewish News
(US PS 275.520)
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CANDLELIGHTING AT 8:43 P.M.

(

VOL. LXXXV, No. 14

Emphasis on `ten words'

Shavuot has a message that resches out to all mankind.
Because the credo for this major festival on the Jewish calendar is the
Ten Commandments, the Aseret HaDibrot, which are spelled out in the Ten
Words, the great occasion is therefore the admonition to mankind to adhere to
highest goals in ethical practices. Therefore, the duty commences with Jews
themselves as the propagators and introducers of the great ideals embodied in
the Commandments. It is also a message to those who are indifferent to the
ideals and are faulted in respecting life and limb of peoples of all faiths and
offering views which must be treated as having broken the law.
How unfortunate that such a message should be linked with Shavuot in
deference to legal condemnations of people claiming to be adherents of the
faith who endorse violence.
That is why there is such great need to emphasize the human factor as
read in the Ten Words. It serves as a warning that threats to Jewish ethical
codes are impermissible and that violence will never be condoned.
Therefore, the Shavuot greeting in a spirit of holding high the banner of
ethical decencies.

Individual difference

We Detroiters often take our freedoms for granted. It's only natural. The
sheer size of our society has led to impersonal government and the prevailing
attitude that one individual's response — especially to a foreign
government's policy of enslavement — will make little difference.
A growing group of Detroit families are taking the opposite view in
response to the plight of Soviet Jewry. The bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah
"twinning" program coordinated by the Detroit Soviet Jewry Committee of
the Jewish Community Council has individual families getting involved, led
by the youth who are asking to be twinned with a Soviet Jewish counterpart.
Although Soviet law permits the teaching of Hebrew and Yiddish,
Communist policy and Russian bureaucracy actively discriminate against
these two languages and Jewish ritual. Often, the sole awareness of their
religion for the two million Jews in the Soviet Union is through
discrimination in education and employment.
The twinning program provides personal contact between the Jews of
Detroit and the Jews of Russia. The attempts to get letters and telephone calls
through the Iron Curtin are sporadically successful. No one will argue that
one letter or phone call will be the spark that will re-open the gates for the
400,000 Soviet Jews who have applied to emigrate, or be the catalyst for a
revival of interest in the religion of our ancestors for either Soviet or
American Jewry.
But the program will make a difference in encouraging oppressed
individuals and in giving free individuals here an additional, tangible,
modern meaning for our ancient values.
Our youth are not the only ones who can make a difference. It only takes a
20-cent stamp to write tb the Soviet Embassy in Washington or Chairman
Chernenko in Moscow. The letters may not get to the hoped-for destination
and it may take years before the gates open wider, but the Rusisans will know
that we are watching as they try to slam the gates shut.

Six-Day War: shattering images
in world's perception of Mideast

BY VICTOR M. BIENSTOCK

Special to The Jewish News

Six days in June 1967 shook the
entire Jewish world and altered the
course of Jewish history. The shock
waves generated then still reverber-
ate.
The dramatic outcome of the
Six-Day War in which the State of
Israel confronted and shattered the
combined military might of the Arab
states that had vowed its destruction
marked a significant change in the
world's attitude toward the Jewish
people and the Jewish state which
the world regarded as Jewry's politi-
cal expression.
Since the proclamation of Is-
rael's statehood in 1948, the world

From a Jewish David
facing the Goliath of the
Arab world, Israel became
the Goliath confronted by
the Palestine Arab David.

had come, increasingly, to view the
Jewish people through the perspec-
tive of that tiny state on the Mediter-
ranean that held, in 1967, perhaps a
sixth of the world's Jews — far fewer
than the number of Jews held captive
in the Soviet Union.
Prior to 1967, the popular image
of Israel was of a tiny, beleaguered
state, its back to the sea, confronted

on all sides by a foe of overwhelming
dimensions pledged to its utter de-
struction. The temptation was al-
most irresistable to regard Israel as
an underdog, a David heroically con-
fronting an irresistable Goliath.
Israel, on the eve of the Six-Day
War, provided all the elements that
command sympathy and support: a
homeless people returning to its an-
cestral land after 2,000 years; a
young, struggling nation generously
opening its arms to the millions of
Jews left homeless and in misery
after the most devastating war in the
world's history; a people grimly de-
termined to build its homeland on the
sand and rocks of a barren land which
had lain desolate for centuries.
There was another factor. Au-
schwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau and
the other death camps of the
Holocaust had shocked the world into
some recognition of the depths of
savagery and bestiality to which
modern man could fall. Most people,
to one degree or another, felt some
sense of shame and even personal
guilt. Public expressions of anti-
Semitism, as common before 1940 as
weather reports, had become most
unfashionable. Manifestations of
anti-Jewish racism were promptly
and vigorously condemned.
Zionists took this as proof that
Pinsker, Herzl and the other creators

Continued on Page 28

A note to our readers

A newspaper has many functions: to inform its readers, to prod them,
to challenge them and to stimulate their interests. But a wise newspaper
must also do its best to please its readers.
We have been gratified to hear the many positive responses to our
recent editorial and graphic changes in The Jewish News. The one nega-
tive comment we heard was that the Obituary page had been moved. There
was a reason for that move, but if you, the readers, were unhappy, it wasn't
worth it. We want to be responsive to your interests and needs, so we have
moved the Obituaries back to where you are used to reading them.
We hope you will contiue to enjoy the paper and to let us know what
you like and don't like, because our purpose is to serve you.

