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BIENSTOCK Special to The Jewish News Insect Repellent, Mosquito Nets, Duffie Bags, Trunks, Blankets, Sleeping Bags, Air Mattresses, Sleep Pads, Waterproof Pads, Day Packs, Flashlights & Batteries, Tents, Back Packs, Tent-supplies AND MUCH MUCH MORE . . .!!! ALL ITEMS DISCOUNT PRICES Deal Direct with the Owners Ask for Jeff or Eddie IT'S EASY TO ENTER: The Lessons Of Bitburg For U.S. And Germany • S 1.00 general parking • S2.50 grandstand admission (S1.25 senior citizens every day) • $3.50 clubhouse admission Ladbroke DRC Schoolcraft and Middlebelt, just off the Jeffries Fwy. The Thoroughbred of Michigan Racing *Entries also available at specially marked Grandstand gate 9-11 a.m. race day.No purchase necessary. One entry per person. You must be 18. A small German town near the Luxembourg frontier may turn out to be the rock on which Ronald Wilson Reagan's courtship of the American Jewish community foundered. It was on the issue of whether the President of the United States should pay homage to the German war dead interred at Bitburg — including 47 who had we -n the death's head emblem of the. Waf- fen SS — that the American Jewish community found itself almost unanimously at odds with the man who has been so often hailed as "the best friend the State of Israel ever had in the White House." The confrontation between the White House and the American Jewish community is the sharpest since 1981 when President Re- agan rode roughshod over desper- ate Jewish resistance and ram- med through Congress authoriza- tion to deliver enhanced AWACs surveillance planes to Saudia Arabia. The scars of AWACs have largely healed by now, in large part because of the measures taken by the Administration to strengthen Israel's defense poten- tial. It has been difficult, however, to put out of mind Mr. Reagan's blunt warning then that if Ameri- can Jews persisted in placing Is- rael's interests ahead of those of the United States — which he im- plied they were doing by fighting the AWACs deal — there could be an anti-Semitic reaction here. The implication was there: if the American Jewish community played ball with the Administra- tion and did not tie its hands in the Middle East, it would bd re- warded with favors bestowed on the State of Israel. If it proved to be obstreperous, these favors would be withheld. This is the kind of hardball poli- tics the men around Reagan understand and play. You give something and you get some- thing. You can play that game with F-15s and tanks and smart missiles but not with memories. And because memories were the fundamental issue in the Bitburg episode, the Regans and the Deavers and the Buchanans who counsel the President were un- able to give him guidance. The White House Jewish con- tact man should have had some input but Marshall Bi-eger, who tried to pressure Elie Weisel into muting his criticism of the President's decision to visit Bit- burg, confessed that he had not had direct access to the President on the question, and had dealt only with Donald Regan, the White House chief of staff who is slowly learning what pitfalls lie concealed in even the simplest problem. So there was the President, eager to bestow a political favor on Chancellor Helmut Kohl by making the gesture stressing German-American reconciliation and burying the enmity of World War II. To his thinking, it was better to stress a friendly future than to recall the enmity of the past. That the gesture Kohl wanted of him and that he readily agreed to make would be construed as an insult to the six million Jews and the millions of other Europeans who perished at the hands of the Nazis most certainly never crossed his mind. Weeks before his plan to visit the cemetery at Bitburg to honor the German war dead was re- vealed, Mr. Reagan declined an invitation from Kohl to pay a visit to the site of the Dachau concen- tration camp because he thought it would be too depressing to go there and because he feared if he You can play that game with F-15s and tanks and smart missiles but not with memories. did it would extend guilt for the Holocaust to the present genera- tions of Germans. He did not wish to visit the sins of the fathers on the sons. Mr. Reagan lived through the Nazi era and World War II; it is difficult to understand why he would assume that there were no survivors of that era in Germany today. Nor can we know how de- eply the struggle against Nazism involved him. He served out the war in Hollywood as a captain making films for the U.S. Air Force. He certainly never came face to face in the Battle of the Bulge with any of the Waffen SS men who murdered American prisoners at Malmedy, not too far from Bitburg. Some of the SS men who participated in that massacre may be among the 47 buried in the Bitburg cemetery. In the final analysis, it has be- come irrelevant whether the President visits Bitburg and hon- ors the war dead or cancels the visit in a last-minute attempt at damage control. What the President naively conceived as a gesture of friendship and recon- ciliation forced both Americans and Germans to confront the ugly past and the Nazi record of horror. A most disturbing feature was the speed and considerable unanimity with which the Ger- mans demonstrated their support of Chancellor Kohl's insistence that Mr. Reagan go through with the Bitburg ceremony and their backing of the Chancellor's de- fense of the Waffen SS. An over- whelming majority in the West German Bundestag rejected a resolution calling on the govern- ment to eliminate the Bitburg stop from the Reagan itinerary. Even more disturbing to those who had fondly dreamed of a new Germany from which the anti- Semitism of the past had been eradicated was the degree of anger against American Jews. A West German paper with more than a million circulation would not have featured a cover story on "The Reagan Visit in Germany: The Power of the Jews" if its editors did not believe it would over go over well. The arti-