Fighting Anti-Semitism .1
Force and violence have been JDL's calling card.
RACHEL POMERANCE
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
New York City
n its Web site, the Jewish Defense League
says one of its principles is "to help Jews
everywhere and to change the Jewish
image through sacrifice and all necessary
means — even strength, force and violence."
If the charges that led to Wednesday's arrest of
the JDL's leader Iry Rubin and member Earl
Krugel are true, the group remains true to its
ideals.
In the name of fighting anti-Semitism, the JDL
has used violence and intimidation ever since it
was formed in 1968 by Rabbi Meir Kahane to
mount an armed response to anti-Semitic inci-
dents in New York City. Its symbol is a raised fist
inside a Star of David.
The group has been implicated in hundreds of
violent or provocative incidents, according to Gail
Gans, director of the Anti-Defamation League's
Civil Rights Information Center.
Kahane moved to Israel in 1971, and resigned as
head of the JDL in 1974. He formed the Kach
Party, which advocated expelling all Arabs from
Israel, and was elected to the Knesset in 1984. But
Kach was declared racist and forbidden to run in
the 1988 elections.
When Kahane was assassinated by an Egyptian
extremist in New York in 1990, his son, Binyamin
Ze'ev Kahane, worked with Kach and later started
another organization called Kahane Chai.
Kahane Chai and Kach were named terrorist
organizations by the Israeli government and out-
lawed in 1994. Binyamin Ze'ev Kahane and his
wife were killed earlier this year in an ambush on
the West Bank.
Rubin, 56, a former Air Force sergeant and con-
servative Republican, joined the JDL in the 1970s
and became chairman in 1985. He has been arrest-
ed more than 40 times, by his own count.
The Los Angeles group headed by Rubin is one of
two in this country that splintered from the original
JDL. It considers the other group, the Jewish
Defense Organization in New York, an archrival.
JDO's head, Mordechai Levy, shot at Rubin
from the roof of his apartment building in New
York when Rubin tried to subpoena him for a
slander suit in 1989. Levy was jailed for the act.
The JDL has claimed it has 13,000 members
nationwide, a figure Gans dismissed as "wildly
exaggerated." She estimates they have no more
than a couple hundred members in the United
States.
Most active in the 1970s, the JDL has been
accused of complicity in numerous actions
0
Related editorial: page 31
designed to call attention to the plight of Soviet
Jewry.
They include pouring blood over the head of a
Soviet diplomat after crashing a Washington recep-
tion, letting loose mice at a concert by a Soviet
orchestra, commandeering a New York synagogue
across from the USSR's U.N. mission to hold an
anti-Soviet demonstration and detonating a bomb
in the Manhattan offices of Aeroflot.
The group often denied responsibility for
attacks, while still praising them. For example,
Kahane denied responsibility for the Aeroflot
bombing, but said, "Any protest to help enslaved
Local Response
Local Jewish civil rights organizations praised the
FBI on the arrest of JDL Chairman Iry Rubin
and member Earl Krugel, a former Detroiter:
"If the allegations against the JDL prove to be
true, they are extraordinarily serious. We have
long regarded the JDL as an extremist group,
one whose ideas and actions are not in any way
representative of the Jewish community. Any
plan to use violence against another faith or eth-
nic group — indeed, to attack a house of wor-
ship — is terrorism, plain and simple. We praise
the diligent work of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and the U. S. Attorney's Office that
led to the arrest. We have full confidence that
this case will be thoroughly investigated and the
perpetrators brought to justice."
— Sharona Shapiro, Michigan area director
The American Jewish Committee
— Fran Gross, interim director
Anti-Defamation League, Michigan Region
— David Gad-Ha7f, executive director
Jewish Community Council of Metropolitan Detroit
people is a legitimate form of protest — including
bombing and other forms of violent action."
Other JDL targets included Arab diplomats,
neo-Nazis, Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification
Church and even left-wing Israelis.
The group has targeted Jewish institutions as
well.
When they thought the Jewish Federation of San
Francisco was not meeting the community's needs,
JDL members broke into the office of the vice
president and assaulted four staff members,
including a disabled person who was a concentra-
tion camp survivor.
JDL members also locked themselves in the lobby
and blocked entry to a New York building that
houses many Jewish organizations, demanding to see
an official from the Conference of Presidents of
Major American Jewish Organizations.
They frequently invaded New York's Park East
Synagogue, opposite the Soviet Union's U.N. mis-
sion, to demonstrate for Soviet Jews. At other
times, they took over the offices of the Hebrew
Immigrant Aid Society, the Israeli Consulate in
New York, an Israel aliyah office in Queens, N.Y.,
and the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies office
in New York, among others.
Substance Or Publicity?
In recent years, however, the group has been less
active, and Gans was surprised by the alleged bombing
plot revealed Wednesday. She called it "counterpro-
ductive," given the immense pressure right now on
both the United States and Israel to fight terrorism.
But she said one shouldn't discount the group's
quest for publicity as a motive.
"They want very much to appear that they are
the ones the Jewish community would look to for
protection, and they're not," she said. "The organ-
ized Jewish community disdains what they do and
is very critical of them." In fact, she noted, an
ADL publication once referred to the group as the
"Jewish Defense League: Exploiter of Fear."
Though the JDL was among the earliest advo-
cates for Soviet Jewry, it's unclear to what extent
their exploits helped force the issue onto the agen-
da of more mainstream Jewish organizations.
Some discount their contribution.
Murray Friedman, director of the Feinstein
Center for American Jewish History at Temple
University, said the JDL was only one of several
groups that were beginning to press the establish-
ment to be more active on the issue. Friedman,
who is working on his third book on Soviet Jewry,
said the JDL was not a "major player" on the
Soviet Jewry issue, and he called many of their
techniques "odious." Gans, too, said the group has
been ineffective as an advocate for Jews.
"The JDL is the self-appointed guardian that
really is an unwanted guardian because, in fact,
they haven't improved the lot of Jews in America
at all, not one iota," she said. "Not one good thing
that has happened to the Jewish community in
America can be attributed to the JDL."
Yet Friedman said the group did help solidify
the Jews' determination to defend themselves after
the Holocaust.
"One small residue of the moment is their slo-
gan, 'Never Again!' which captured a mood that
began in the late 1960s and early '70s," he said.
"Jews weren't going to allow themselves to be
pushed around again." The JDL lionizes Ze'ev
Jabotinsky, the right-wing Zionist ideologue who
said that only concerted Jewish self-defense —
what he called the "Iron Wall" — would deter
Arab aggression.
The group also counts Baruch Goldstein, who
murdered 29 Arabs praying in a Hebron mosque
in 1994, as one of its charter members.
❑
More on the Jewish Defense League:
www. d e tro i tj ewis h n ews .com
12/21
2001
25