EDITORIAL

Dry Bones

We Need More
Conferences

We applaud the efforts of the Council of
Jewish Federations and its professional
staff in having enough concern about the
resettlement of Soviet Jewish emigres to
convene last week in Chicago and discuss
the major issues.
Our worry is that it is going to take
many, many more meetings such as this to
implement appropriate policy that will
help these new Americans find a place for
themselves in this country. It's difficult to
hear from some of the newly settled Soviets
that life in the adjustment period in the
United States is never-ending. Indeed, it is
difficult enough for a middle class Ameri-
can family to survive these days. Try to
comprehend what it must be like if you

can't speak the language or you must
become retrained in an area in which you
are already well-trained.
Our feeling is that CJF, itself, should br-
ing Soviet emigres on staff who can give
our leadership a true "feel" of the Jewish
experience. Why should we, in our comfor-
table American lifestyles, be the ones to
judge what our new community members
are feeling? We all should understand that
last week's meeting in Chicago, covered on
Page 1 by reporter Amy Mehler, should be
viewed as a start.
Meetings like this should happen
regularly. They should not be news. In-
novative new acculturation and funding
policies should be the news.

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Guaranteeing Emigration

The Soviet Parliament approval this
week, after years of delay, of the USSR's
first law granting citizens the right to
travel and emigrate, is important and
welcome news.
The specifics of the law are still not
known in this country; there are those who
say that the legislation does not go far
enough, and it will not go into effect until
January 1993. Also, skeptics believe that
the only reason the law was passed was to
remove the major obstacle to receiving
most-favored-nation status from the
United States. But the so-called freedom-of-
movement law represents a major advance
in the Soviet Union's recognition of the
values of human rights.
Ironically, though the Soviet Jewry
movement has long called for such a law,
the new bill may have little practical effect
on Soviet Jewish emigration because Jews
have been among the few ethnic groups
permitted to leave the USSR in large

numbers of late. But the law transforms
this recent trend into a legal guarantee.
Another positive effect is that citizens
who apply to go to Israel will not be
stripped automatically of their Soviet
citizenship.

This new legislation will test whether
Western countries will be willing to take in
large numbers of Soviets. Israel has long
met that test. It has encouraged and
welcomed Soviet Jews to "return" to their
spiritual homeland and has struggled
mightily to cope with the resultant exodus,
though it faces serious problems in pro-
viding housing and employment for the
hundreds of thousands of newcomers.

The new emigration law does not repre-
sent a panacea, but for the meantime, the
USSR should be applauded for taking a
step closer toward the family of nations by
breaking down barriers of isolation and
fear.

Preserving Rights

Pressures on the nation's legal system,
mostly from the war on drugs, are creating
changes within it of questionable merit.
The most recent was last week's ruling by
the U.S. Supreme Court allowing persons
arrested without a warrant to be imprison-
ed for up to 48 hours while awaiting a
judicial determination of whether the ar-
rest was proper.

Surprisingly, the strongest dissenter in
the court's 5-4 decision was neither liberal
nor moderate, those members of the high
court that most readily preserve civil
rights.

Instead, the judge protesting most
strenuously was Judge Antonin Scalia, the
court's most conservative member. Judge
Scalia objected that the 48-hour delay
breaks common-law traditions and the

6

FRIDAY, MAY 24, 1991

Fourth Amendment's prohibition against
"unreasonable" seizures.
On this matter we agree with Judge
Scalia emphatically.
The court's decision sets into motion yet
another erosion of Americans' basic rights.
Unfortunately, it is a movement which has
been triggered by the tragic tenor of our
time, an era in which drug dealers are
armed with assault guns and 10-year-olds
are arrested for taking — at gunpoint — a
propeller-topped beanie from a nine-year-
old.
At moments like this, when the nation is
engaged in the domestic equivalent of a
war, civil rights might seem like a luxury.
Instead, they are one of the very bedrocks
of the country. To cut away civil rights, one
by one, is a victory for the drug dealers and
a resounding defeat for all of us.

LETTERS 1--

Other Issues
And Dan Quayle

While it's encouraging to
know that Vice President
Quayle is a strong supporter
of Israel, it is distressing that
most who commented in Kim
Litton's story on this issue in
your May 17 edition appeared
not to be interested in his
stand on other issues. Except
for Jewish Community Coun-
cil Director David Gad-Harf,
comments about Quayle were
limited to his stand on Israel.
For American Jews to use
that as the only test for
Quayle's qualifications is an
abdication of citizenship
responsibility. Where does he
stand on the issue of separa-
tion of church and state, on
freedom of speech, on issues of
choice involving abortion, on
equal rights for women, on
civil rights and civil liberties
in general? I think we will
find that on each of these
issues, Quayle stands direct-
ly opposite the traditional
values of most American
Jews.
Furthermore, we have to
ask other questions; does he
have the intelligence and
stature to be the leader of our
nation? What is there in his
history that gives us the con-
fidence that he can lead the
nation in these difficult
times?
While support for Israel is
obviously very important to
American Jews, we must not
forget that a president deals

with many, many other issues
of great importance to us and
to the whole world.

Leon S. Cohan
Bloomfield Hills

Intermarriage
And Tradition

In Gary Rosenblatt's arti-
cle, "Should Intermarried
Jews Be Community
Leaders?" (May 10), he
berates the Reform movement
for accepting as Jews the
children of Jewish fathers and
non-Jewish mothers, thus
"rewriting biblical law." He
goes on to comment that a
"cynic could suggest the
Reform resolution was based
on keeping the movement
alive"
In the wake of the destruc-
tion of the Temple and the
Diaspora our rabbis wrote the
Talmud, which in effect
rewrote biblical law. A cynic
might suggest that the Tan-
naim and Ammoraim were
trying to "keep the movement
alive." Thank God they were
successful.
More recently, Rabbi
Ephriam Bryks, a graduate of
the Denver Yeshiva and a
member of the Rabbinical
Council of America, citing the
responsa of the Achiezer and
the Marsham, advised in a
case of a Jewish father and
non-Jewish mother that the
child should be converted "Al
Da'at Beit Din" as long as the

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