EDITORIAL

A Bittersweet Birthday

On Saturday, Palestine Liberation Organization leader Abu Jihad
was murdered in Tunis. If Israel was the executioner, was it an ap-
propiate action? Will Abu Jihad's demise enhance the security of
Israel and the Jewish people? Will it contribute to a solution of the
Arab-Israeli conflict?
On Monday, in a statement that took 12 hours to read, an Israeli
court found John Demjanjuk guilty of atrocities during the Holocaust.
Should Demjanjuk — whom the court identified as the sadistic Ivan
the Terrible of the Treblinka death camp — be executed? He would
be only the second in Israel's history to receive capital punishment.
Does the mini-war fought on Monday between the United States
and Iran portend a greater U.S. involvement in the Persian Gulf,
with the possible loss of American life? Is the United States openly
siding with Iraq, one of Israel's most intractable foes? Should
America be helping Iraq, which recently killed hundreds of its Kur-
dish citizens with chemical weapons?
And, although Jesse Jackson received only 31 percent of the vote
in Tuesday's New York primary (front-runner Mike Dukakis received
54 percent), Jackson has shown impressive strength in the race for
the Democratic presidential nomination. What clout in the party
has been accorded Jackson, many of whose positions Jews consider
to be hostile to their interests?

When you are a child, innocence is a desirable trait. But for adults
in this hostile age, it can be dangerous, even fatal. Israel has grown
up fast.
The wonder is not that the Jewish state has lost its innocence,
but that the loss has only taken 40 years. The United States held
onto its naivete for nearly two centuries. But the times are different.
Things move faster these days. Besides, the people of Israel had a
head start. They began losing their ingenuousness 5,000 years ago.
lb be sure, the Jews who pioneered in Palestine in the 1920s were
fresh-faced, idealistic young people; a generation relatively undamag-
ed by the hatred that has plagued Jews for millennia. They came
to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea
with the innocent dream of making the desert bloom into a homeland
for the Jews. _
And they succeeded. But with the second wave of immigration,
the adults came to Israel. The people who had experienced the water-
shed of Western civilization, the Holocaust, those who had seen and
endured man's awful inhumanity, carried Palestine into the era of
statehood.
Israel was then a mix of old Zionists and new, the idealists and
the innocent, the disillusioned and the tough-minded. Since then,
events and the evolution of statehood have combined to strip the
Jewish state of much of its naivete. Constant attack has forced Israel
to act pragmatically for its own survival, and for the greater good
of what is left of Western civilization.
Happily, as Israel enters its fifth decade as a sovereign nation,
its hope and its idealistic core remain intact. Despite the hate and
death that its Arab neighbors continue to pour upon it, despite in-
credible pressure to become a modern day Sparta, despite the
unbelievable stress of 40 years of war and daily terrorism, Israel con-
tinues to maintain its living democracy, complete with a free and
open press, freedom of religion, the right to vote and to be represented
in a parliamentary form of government, and the privileges of self
determination.
We congratulate Israel on the magnificence of her spirit, on the
retention of her humanity and, with some sadness, on the loss of
her innocence. Welcome to the agony and the dignity of adulthood.

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More Questions

It was one of those weeks. In quick succession, one major news
story followed another with a Jewish or Middle East angle, leaving
us trying to make sense of it all. In an introspective mood for Yom
Ha'atzmaut, we find we have more questions than answers.

LETTERS

Our Active
Federation

The Jewish News article,
"Monitoring the Process'
(April 15), served as a
refresher course for many of
us and brought to mind the
growth of our own Federation
over the years as well as the
development of the Large
City Budgeting Conference of
the Council of Jewish
Federations.
Our Detroit Federation was
especially active during the
early years and contributed
substantially in solving the
many financial and
budgeting problems of our na-
tional agencies. The article

6 FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 1988

was informative and
historically important.

George M. Stutz
Huntington Woods

A Tribute To
Soapy Williams

A friend at the Michigan
Supreme Court sent me a
copy of your article on Soapy
that appeared in the March
25 issue of The Jewish News.
The article was a beautiful
tribute to my husband. He
would have liked it, too.
Thank you for taking the
time to interview the people
who were quoted in the
article.
Copies of your article are

being sent to the Bentley
Library at the University of
Michigan, which has been
collecting Soapy's papers ever
since he became governor
nearly 40 years ago.

Nancy Q. Williams
GroSse Pointe Farms

Midwest
Babylon

As a native Detroiter and
long-time subscriber to The
Jewish News, I read
("Midwest Babylon" April 1)
with great interest . . . David
Holzel deserves accolades for
a job well done .. .
In reporting on Orthodox
educational institutions, you

did not highlight . . . the
Yeshivah Gedolah of Greater
Detroit, which was founded a
number of years ago as an off-
shoot of Yeshivath Beth
Yehudah .. .
I must also take issue with
the popular, yet obvious
distortion of Chasidism,
which you underscored in the
article: "Chasidism, founded
in Eastern Europe in the 18th
Century, consciously seeks to
nourish the Jewish soul, often
neglected in the rational pur-
suit of Talmud study."
Such a definition of
Chasidism does a disservice
to this movement as a whole.
Firstly, it casts an image of a
blind follower, devout but ig-
norant of his heritage. This

stereotype belies the state-
ment in Avot (2:6): "The
unlearned cannot be pious
(chasid)."
Even worse, this misrepre-
sentation of Chasidism has
fueled Buber's humanistic
Judaism and the Reconstruc-

Continued on Page 12

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