Heroes, peace, fact and fiction

‘Righteous Heroes’

Tom Tugend’s article, “Righteous Heroes” (June 29), was excellent.

It resonated with my own experiences as a fugitive from a Nazi labor camp, hiding under a Catholic identity first in Warsaw and later in Vienna. I survived because several decent gentiles, often at great risk to their lives, helped me. Typically, their motivation was — like the farmer in Tugend’s article said: “Somebody needed help. So I helped.”

A Polish supervisor smuggled into the camp a camera to take my “passport” picture for a false ID card; a German boss told me to escape because “tomorrow will be too late …”; a local Volksdeutsche family hid me for several days after I had escaped, while the camp was being liquidated.

Many others, at different times and in various forms, contributed to my survival. They were all heroes, yet none of them made the Yad Vashem’s Righteous Gentiles list. Why?

The Yad Vashem’s list of about 20,000 righteous under-reflects — by a factor as high as 10, perhaps — the number of those who helped save Jewish lives. The reasons for this low number vary.

Some rescuers did not survive the war; a few declined to be on that list; some who were rescued died before they could name their rescuers (several thousand Jews already rescued, perished in Warsaw uprising); in some cases, the rescuers names were not known, their names changed or their whereabouts could not be found.

Often, Jews who received false documents or a temporary shelter did not think that such help — though critical — was sufficient to qualify for the Yad Vashem list.

Zenon Neumark
Author
“Hiding in the Open” (Vallentine Mitchell)

Re-Engaging Fatah

Gidi Grinstein argues that “we can now re-engage Fatah in the West Bank. The new Palestinian government headed by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is the most moderate for which one could ask.” (“A Pyrrhic Victory for Hamas?” June 22). Really?

[Mahmoud] Abbas and the Fatah movement he co-founded with Yasser Arafat do not actually recognize Israel and thus do not support the idea of a Palestinian state living peacefully beside Israel. On the contrary, Fatah’s constitution calls to this day for the destruction of Israel (Article 12) and the use of terrorism against Israelis as an integral element in the campaign to achieve that goal (Article 19).

In case anyone had doubts, Abbas confirmed in an Al Arabiya’ (Dubai) television interview (Oct. 3, 2006) that, in his view, “It is not required of Hamas or of Fatah to recognize Israel.”

Earlier this year, Abbas declared at a mass rally that “our rifles, all our rifles are aimed at the occupation.” He has stated of Palestinian suicide bombers that “Allah loves the martyr” and described Palestinian terrorists wanted by Israel as “heroes fighting for freedom.”

In the past year, he supported the so-called prisoners plan, which called for more terrorism and abrogates Palestinian obligations under past agreements, and then signed with Hamas the Mecca agreement to form a unity, which likewise called for more terrorism.

Those who call Fatah “moderate” are making the same mistake they made when they called the post-Oslo Arafat a “moderate.”

Morton A. Klein
National President
Zionist Organization of America

Seeds of Peace

In Rabbi David Wolpe’s review of “Peace Be Upon You,” we see again the Judaism and Christianity have dark and bloody pasts and the Jews, Christians and Muslims all lived together peacefully in the beneficent realm of Islam tropes uttered by too many since Sept. 11 (“Seeds of Peace Revealed in Early Coexistence,” June 29).

For that matter, there was black-white coexistence in the Old South, both before and after the Civil War. Lynchings didn’t happen every day, preachers (imams) didn’t call for action (jihad) against the darkies (infidels) every week, nor were the Jim Crow laws (sharia) a bar to the nonwhites (non-Muslims) carrying on day-to-day life.

Similarly, there were “seeds of peace” in the everyday relations of Jews and Christians in Poland before the Holocaust or in Russia before the Bolshevik seizure of power. Yes, we have much to learn today from these early models of peaceful coexistence.

Chaim Sisman
Los Angeles

Fed Up

The failure of The Federation (“Does New JCC at Milken Mean More Trouble for Others?” June 29), That is what I see with the crucial problem of the Milken JCC debacle.

The Federation, which I served twice within a professional role, is really not a federation but a fundraising arm of Israel and other international organizations. In other communities all over the United States and Canada, the federation is the focus of the whole Jewish community. That is true in every city but Los Angeles. There is no Community Relations Committee, although at one time, the Community Relations Committee was the focus of all relationships with other religious and ethnic groups.

[Jewish] Family Service raises its own money and does its own planning. The Hebrew Free Loan does the same, as does the Jewish Home for the Aging and the Jewish Vocational Service. Cedars-Sinai does not need The Federation. Only the Bureau of Jewish Education is under the aegis of The Federation.

In every community around the country, they are building centers to serve the community and to unite the whole community. Not here.

There is no voice for the Jewish community as it is in every major Jewish community in the U.S. and Canada.

The center problem is symptomatic of the poverty of ideas at 6505 [Wilshire Blvd].

Al Mellman
Los Angeles

Explosion of Art

I read David Suissa’s commentary, “