“Look Forward to Looking Back”
jews d
in
the
continued from page 44
called the group “proof of the deplorable disunity” splitting
American Jewry and inapposite to the “dire needs of the hour.”
Despite his harsh editorial about the Council, the Sermonette
of the Week immediately adjacent to this editorial was written
by Dr. Franklin. Perhaps this was mere coincidence, or per-
haps this was Slomovitz’s subtle way of showing that disagree-
ments in the community could be handled in a civil manner
without malice.
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Slomovitz used his bully pulpit to advocate causes in which
he was invested, but there is little evidence of that aggres-
sive advocacy when it came to reporting about the tragedy
befalling European Jewry. Almost all articles relating to the
European crisis in the first few months of the Jewish News were
one or two paragraphs of
two or three sentences,
and the size and place-
ment of the articles, with-
out larger context, would
not sound serious bells of
alarm.
By May, many of the
front-page headlines
were about European
Jewry but the stories
might be only two or
three sentences even
when the headlines
screamed of mass mur-
der. For several months,
Slomovitz aggregated
various JTA bulletins
about Europe in a feature
titled “World-Wide News
at a Glance,” and he used
a small font to squeeze
in more news, making
the entire feature hard to
read. By July, the feature
had expanded to over
two-thirds of a page and
Slomovitz added head-
lines making the feature
easier to read.
Even though the news
from Europe was scat-
tered and incomplete,
Jewish News readers would know the situation in Europe was
no ordinary pogrom or temporary anti-Semitic outbreak.
Headlines such as “60,000 Vilna Jews Massacred by Nazis”
became common as the year wore on although sometimes the
same type of story would receive prominence and other times
the story would be buried among local news articles.
In July, however, a page 2 story was headlined “Nazis
Massacre 700,000 Jews in Poland,” and the story relayed that the
dead equaled one-third of the total Jewish population in Poland
and trucks containing poison gas were used. An article directly
beneath that story reported that 300,000 more had been killed
in Lithuania.
The two stories combined were two paragraphs long and
provided little detail. Although these two paragraphs reported
the death of more than a million Jews, there was no other men-
tion of these atrocities in the paper — no editorial or commen-
tary or any type of special feature although there was a short
editorial the following week urging Roosevelt and Churchill to
condemn the atrocities.
The amount of coverage about the crisis in Europe and
the significance afforded that coverage varied from week to
week, but in general took up more of the paper as weeks went
on. Slomovitz also wrote some editorials and commentaries
continued on page 48
46
July 18 • 2017
jn