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Friday, January 25, 1985
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
PURELY COMMENTARY
PHILIP SLOMOVITZ
Shouting Diplomats:
Restoring Sense
An ordinary Jew has a simple defini-
tion: he is a Jew who accepts the realities of
identifying with his people. The battle that
ended temporarily in Israel, in a debate
that rejected an attempt to restrict the
religious rights of Jews, fortunately
avoided a rift that could well lead to the
elminiation of the overwhelming majority
of all Jews from their people's ministra-
tions and associated services.
There is nothing new in experienced
shouting and name-calling in the Israel
parliament. It began between David Ben-
Gurion and Menachem Begin, and their
respective associates upon the very forma-
tion of the Knesset in the first parliamen-
tary experiences in reborn Israel. They
continued last week. They will probably go
on and on. As long as the decisive vote will
be on a par with the one recorded on Jan.
16, when the destructive proposal that
would have alienated Reform and Conser-
vative Jews was defeated, there is hope for
common sense.
Yet, the danger exists. What had oc-
curred was like splitting Israel into two
civilizations. Any attempt to reject those
who are not Orthodox is damaging to a
nation's existence. If the Knesset had ruled
to impose the restrictions that were in-
tended, it would have been a death blow to
Jewish unity, both in Israel and the Dias-
pora.
It might have been hoped that Likud
would narrow its prejudices which could be
judged as detrimental to religious freedom
for Jews who differ from the Orthodox
viewpoint. Perhaps what happened thus
far will also be a death blow to much of
Likud ideology in the Diaspora. That party
had gained strong support here under Be-
gin. It can lose it under religious in-
tolerance applied to fellow Jews.
Global Echo Plays a Role In Minsk-Detroit Handshake
Whatever the causes that led to De-
troit and Minsk becoming Sister Cities, the
factors evolving create interest on a global
scale and bring to light changing condi-
tions in two vast communities.
The Detroit-Minsk Sister City link
came to light with the report of the visit to
Minsk, the capital of White Russia (Be-
lorussia), by the Detroit City Council dele-
gation headed by its president, Erma Hen-
derson. Accompanying her were council
members Maryann Mahaffey, who was ac-
companied by her husband; John Peoples;
Barbara-Rose Collins and Clyde Cleve-
land.
The Detroit delegation studied the
White Russian capital's methods of avert-
ing crime and its educational tactics.
The report to be issued on the trip by
Council President Henderson will surely
be interesting and the advice to be
gathered from it may well prove of value to
Detroit. Meanwhile, the Minsk factor, not-
ably in its Jewish aspects, merits nostalgic
consideration.
For many, -perhaps running into the
thousands in this community, there are
reminiscences postmarked Minsk. This
writer is exemplary, being a native of
Nowogrodek in the Minsk Gubernia.
The history of the community is re-
plete with historically-marked events re-
lated to Russian Jewry, the scholars and
the merchants, the Zionist leaders and
some who were in the revolutionary Bund.
Encyclopedia Judaica, the latest pub-
lished Jewish encyclopedic collection, de-
votes four complete pages to Minsk and its
historical background and personalities.
Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, published
some 35 years earlier, contains one com-
plete Minsk page.
The commencement of the Universal
essay provides a clue to the manifold
Minsk occurrences:
Minsk, capital of the White
Russian Soviet Republic, with a
Jewish population of about 55,000
(1935). As far back as the 15th Cen-
tury Jews were named tax far-
mers. Following their return to
Minsk in 1503, after their expulsion
from Lithuania (1495), a converted
Jew, later Lithuanian finance
minister, Abraham Josefowicz,
took possession of the customs,
and at his death was succeeded by
his unconverted brother Michael
Josefowicz.
King Stephen Batory, in 1579,
granted to the Jews of Minsk a
charter which determined their
legal position. The non-Jewish
merchants, however, in 1606, ob-
tained from King Sigismund III
privileges by which Jewish com-
merce and trade were handi-
capped. In 1609 the king liberated
the Jews . from special taxes, do-
nated to them "for eternity" the
place on which the synagogue and
the cemetery were, and permitted
them to enlarge the cemetery by
the purchase of land (1629). Never-
theless, the Jews were not allowed
to buy real estate or build houses in
the city limits.
The related current developments are
suggested in the concluding paragraph in
Universal:
The Nazi attack on Soviet Rus-
sia (June 1941) marked the begin-
ning of a tragic chapter in the his-
tory of the Jews of Minsk. Some of
them were evacuated or fled to the
inner districts of the Soviet Union.
Revel-University Stamp For 1986: Many Associated Aspects
Under the tutelage of Dr. Bernard Re-
vel, Isaac Elchanan Yeshiva and Theologi-
cal College became Yeshiva University. It
is the leading school of higher learning for
the training of Orthodox rabbis in the
world. Associated with it are several de-
partments that have attained glory
scholastically, especially the Albert Eins-
tein College of Medicine and the Benjamin
Cardozo Law School.
Dr. Revel was truly the creator of
Yeshiva University and because it is a con-
tinuation of the Isaac Elchanan Yeshiva it
is realistic to credit the university with a
centennial appelation, marking, in 1986,
the 100th anniversary of a great school
which now has 7,000 students and boasts
75,000 graduates.
Dr. Norman Lamm is the university's
third president, and the centennial will
also mark his tenth anniversary as
president. The second president was Dr.
Samuel Belkin. They and Dr. Revel had
admiring audiences on a global scale, and
Detroiters have been their admirers, con-
tinuing with the respect accorded cur-
rently to Dr. Lamm.
The significance of the great univer-
sity attains an added mark of importance
with Dr. Lamm's announcement of a deci-
sion by the U.S. Postal Service that a
stamp honoring Yeshiva University's cen-
tennial, with a photo of Dr. Revel, is to be
issued on the centennial date in September
1986.
The national recognition of dedicating
a U.S. postage stamp to a movement and a
personality of distinction has a few Jewish
precedents. Among the famous names on
stamps were Samuel Gompers, the founder
of the American Federation of Labor;
Haym Salomon, the financier of the
Dr. Bernard Revel
Dr. Samuel Belkin
American Revolution; and Albert Eins-
tein. But when this writer proposed to then
U.S. Postmaster General Samuel Summer-
field, who before attaining that office was a
Flint, Mich., auto dealer, that a stamp be
issued to honor the American Jewish Ter-
centenary, in 1954, he rejected the idea.
Therefore, the current honor has spe-
cial merit as a mark of an era when a nota-
ble event and a great personality are given
due recognition.
Fascinating details relate to the life
and career of the late Dr. Bernard Revel.
He was the first graduate of what had been
founded as the Dropsie College of Hebrew
Learning, now Dropsie University. He
earned his Ph.D. degree from the
Philadelphia-based college in 1912. To be
the first graduate of a school that is linked
with a remarkable Philadelphia Jewish
Dr. Norman Lamm
historical aspect is in itself a distinction.
Then there is the story of his marriage
into the wealthy Travis family. His bride
was the daughter of the founder of the Ok-
lahoma Petroleum and Gasoline Company
of Tulsa. The eminent scholar who was
soon to head a great Jewish school of learn-
ing managed that company until he joined
the faculty of what was to become Yeshiva
University, in 1915, retaining the
presidential role until his death in 1940.
Much will surely be spoken and writ-
ten about Bernard Revel and Yeshiva Uni-
versity between now and the commence-
ment of the Yeshiva U. Centennial Year
and during the entire centennial celebra-
tion. These lines are introductory to the
acclaim that will surely be accorded the
merited scholar and the important Ameri-
can Jewish university.
Erma Henderson
Maryann Mahaffey
The Yiddish National Theater of
Minsk was transferred to
Novosibirsk, in Siberia. According
to reports published in the press in
March 1942, the Jews who re-
mained in Minsk were massacred
by order of the Gestapo. In the
Minsk area the number of the vic-
tims was reported to have reached
80,000.
The Encyclopedia Judaica article is: —J
extensively revealing. The population fig-
ures listed there provide valuable demog-
raphic approaches to the study of Minsk
and its creative and tragic stories. It is
important to note from that article that
"come 100,000 Jews were left in the city c/)
when the German forces entered on June ,
28, 1941." Prior to that, this article indi-'\
cates, "Though the 1939 census gave no
details of individual Jewish communities,
it is estimated that the Jewish population 1
of Minsk at the outbreak of the German-
Soviet war (1941) numbered about 90,000
(about 37 percent of the total population)."
The conclusion in the Encyclopedia
Judaica account is a deeply-moving and
distressing account of what has happened /
to a great Jewish community. It states:
A memorial to the Jewish vic-
tims of the Holocaust was erected
in Minsk immediately after World (
War II — the only one in the USSR
— bearing a Yiddish inscription
which explicitly mentions Jewish
victims. On Jan. 13, 1948, Solomon —\
Mikhoels, the chairman of the
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee K
and the director of the Jewish
State Theater in Moscow, was
murdered in Lodochnaya Street in ,)
Minsk while .visiting the city on an
official mission. Later the murder
was acknowledged to have been
the work of the secret police (on
Stalin's orders).
In the 1959 census 38,842 Jews
(
were registered in Minsk, 5,716 of
whom declared Yiddish to be their
mother tongue. However, the
population figure was estimated to
be in fact between 50,000 and
60,000. The Great Synagogue of
Minsk was closed down by the
authorities in 1959, and in the same
year private religious services
were dispersed by the militia. A
small synagogue was left, but in
1964 it was destroyed, as the site
was earmarked for new apartment
buildings.
Eventually the Jewish congre-
gation was allowed to open a small
synagogue in a wooden house on
the outskirts of the city. There is no
Jewish cemetery in Minsk, but
Jews are buried in a separate sec-
tion in the general cemetery. Mat-
zah baking was banned for several
years, and on March 23, 1964, an
article in the local newspaper,
Sovetskaya Belorussiya, condemned
the sending of packages of matzah
to Minsk and Jewish communities
abroad. Kosher poultry, however,
was available. In 1968 several