Opinion

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Dry Bones

www.detroitjewishnews.com

Making Amends For The Past

ne of America's great industrialists, Detroit's
Henry Ford, is remembered almost as
much for his disdain of Jews as his manu-
facturing savvy He died in 1947 at age 83.
Ford, who more than anyone is responsible for
Detroit's prominence on the national industrial
stage, was the quintessential enigma. He befriended
two of Detroit Jewry's giants, Rabbi Leo Franklin of
Temple Beth El and architect Albert Kahn, while
finding social allies in Nazi sympathizers Father
Charles Coughlin of Royal Oak and aviator Charles
Lindbergh, a Detroit native.
If Ford's anti-Semitic newspaper, the Dearborn
Independent, and his peculiar kinship with Adolf Hider
weren't enough, his automotive empire has
had to repeatedly debunk claims that it
somehow condoned or profited from the use
of forced and slave labor at its German sub-
sidiary, Ford-Werke, during World War II.
Two years after his only son, browbeaten Edsel, died
of cancer in 1943 at age 49 — and after his grandchil-
dren blamed him for their father's early death — Ford
gave the company reins to 28-year-old grandson
Henry Ford II, who had just returned from the Navy
As chairman, young Henry became friends with
Jewish leaders, including Detroit's Max Fisher, earnest-
ly trying to repel vestiges of the company's dark past.
Last week, 55 years after the company founder died
a beleaguered old man and not the folk hero of his
youth, Ford Motor Company announced a major
grant to develop the Ford Motor Company Center for
Exploration and Discovery at the Jewish Community
Center in West Bloomfield. The 3,500-square-foot
multimedia education center will trace Judaism's influ-
ence and Jewish culture to provide "a total-immersion
experience into the diversity of Jewish life."

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Notably, Henry Ford, who as a child began
to develop a dislike for Jews, was anti-Semitic
at a time when bias was widely accepted. For
example, Atlanta pencil factory manager Leo
Frank had been lynched not so many years
before for a murder he did not commit. He
was targeted largely because he was Jewish.
Ford's grandson, meanwhile, recognized the
shifting mood of America following the
Holocaust and forever changed the course of
the company that bore his family name.
The Ford Fund grant for the JCC's Ford
Center didn't come without context. The
Detroit Jewish community received it through
its unprecedented capital and endow-
ment drive to rejuvenate the JCC and
fund programs that bolster Jewish
identity and education — namely, the
Millennium Campaign for Detroit's Jewish
Future. The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan
Detroit and its finance arm, the United Jewish
Foundation, oversee this $50 million campaign.
The Ford Center will be in the Harry and
Jeannette Weinberg Judaic Enrichment Center,
which also will contain the David B. Hermelin
ORT Resource Center. More than any other
feature of the $32 million renovation to the JCC's
West Bloomfield and Oak Park buildings, the
Weinberg Center, projected to open next year, stands
to be the spur to the Jewish Community Center of
Metropolitan Detroit becoming Detroit Jewry's cen-
terpiece for informal Jewish culture and learning.
Unwittingly, Ford unveiled plans for the Ford
Center the same week a study for the American
Jewish Committee found that, today, "Americans
have become increasingly supportive of racial and
ethnic equality" and "Jews are perceived in more
positive terms than whites in general."

Negative stereotypes remain, but Jews are consid-
ered by other ethnic groups to be hard working,
intelligent and strongly committed to family,
according to the University of Chicago study.
In the spirit of outreach, the Ford Center is designed
to also appeal to non-Jews. So it should go a long way
toward not only dispelling myths about Jews and fos-
tering ecumenism, but also inspiring people of varied
backgrounds to treat others with dignity and respect.
Important as it is, the Ford grant to the JCC would
take on huge proportions were it to compel other
major companies, whatever their history, to also con-
tribute to worthy minority causes, Jewish or not. ❑

lence start, who failed to keep the Al-Aksa mosque
protesters in line, who took not one step to punish
the men who beat two Israeli reservists to death in
Ramallah, who continued to incite terror and to let
the bomb plotters out of prison, who praised the
"heroic martyrs" for blowing up themselves and
innocent Israeli civilians. He hasn't even taken the
simple step of arresting the men who murdered
Israel's tourism minister nearly four months ago.
Arafat says that "two people cannot rec-
oncile when one demands control over the
other, when one refuses to treat the other as
a partner in peace." The inconvenient fact-
is that he will not state that Israel would like nothing
better than to be out of the Palestinians' internal
affairs, does not demand control over the Palestinians
and has repeatedly offered specific, far-reaching plans
for a lasting peace — all of which he has rejected.
Arafat turned down Camp David and Taba, choosing
to unleash violence rather than pursue diplomacy.
His "Vision of Peace" pretends that the
Palestinians lived up to the letter and spirit of the

Oslo Accords, when the hard fact is that, under his
direction, the Palestinians repeatedly failed to carry
out what they had promised to do. He promised,
for example, to end the incitement to violence; in
fact, he encouraged it, allowing schools to teach
anti-Semitic lies and praising youngsters in training
as guerillas. His Palestinian Authority arranged to
import 50 tons of weapons on the Karine A.
It is no wonder that President George W Bush's
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice dismissed
the essay as "not helpful." Arafat, she said correctly, "real-
ly should get about the business of removing this terror-
ist threat so they can get back to the peace negotiations."
In the end, before they can reach any lasting
agreement on peace, both sides are going to have to
forgive — if not forget
some of the things the
other did to them. But that can't happen until each
side accepts responsibility in the first place and deals
with it honestly. The protest by some Israel Defense
Forces reservists against continuing to serve in the
West Bank and Gaza shows Israel's democratic val-
ues and tolerance for multiple viewpoints. By con-
trast, Arafat's essay shows that he and his authoritar-
ian regime cannot accept the challenge of hard his-
torical facts — and may never be able to.

EDITO RIAL

Related story: page 31

Flawed Vision

r

acts are often inconvenient, but if you are
Yasser Arafat, you can just choose to forget
them. That's what the Palestinian
Authority leader choose to do last week
when he laid out his "Vision of Peace" on the op-ed
page of the New York Times.
The vision itself isn't so terrible — a Palestinian
state on pre-1967 land that promises to live in peace
and harmony with Israel, which is what most of us
thought the Oslo Accords were all about
anyway. He offers no useful formulation
for how Jerusalem might be shared "as one
open city and the capital of two states,"
but he does suggest modestly that the Palestinians
"right of return" will have to recognize Israel's worry
about being overrun demographically.
The problem is that, for all his sweetly concocted
prose, you can't believe Arafat means a word of it.
He begins, for example, by citing the "catastroph-
ic cycle of violence" that began 16 months ago,
making it sound like tit-for-tat. He willfully refuses
to acknowledge that he was the one who let the vio-

EDITO RIAL

--ev

❑

2/8
2002

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