The Southern Jewish weekly. [volume], May 23, 1952, Image 1

About The Southern Jewish weekly. [volume] (Jacksonville, Fla.) 1939-1992

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THE OLDEST AND MOST WIDELY CIRCULATED JEWISH PUBLICATION IN THIS TERRITORY _
VOL. 29 NO. 18
PLAIN TALK
By Alfred Segal
THE TIME I WAS ELIJAH
It's now some weeks since seder
but when can it be 100 late to
speak of the good evening of our
years when we ali gel together to
celebrate an ideal of ours. No, it
never can be too late, so this
column deliberately has to do
with our recent seder in the house
of one of my sons and with an
other seder long ago.
At the recent seder the mo T
ment had come for me to arise in
all my dignity to greet the pro
phet EUjah who all these centur
ies has been wandering around
the world knocking at the hearts
of people. He keeps on saying,
“Ladies and gentlemen, peace,
peace—and justice, too.”
My youngest grandson goes to
She door to open it for his en
trance. I myself with Haggadah
and cop of wine in hand, accom
pany him, walking in the stately
step appropriate to that occasion.
It isn't exactly ritual for me to
go along with the boy, but that's
the way I do iL It's only proper
for the patriarch of the family
to go along to the door with the
little boy, a sort of special honor
for Elijah.
The kid opens the door while
I recite the ritual greeting. When
I return to the table, I remember
that other seder . ... . “Do you
know,” I say, “I was Elijah once
upon a time?”
Everybody wonders how I could
be Elijah. I don't look it at all;
that is to say. I am not in the
physical pattern of prophets, to
_ say nothing of ihe spiritual con
tent of prophets: Prophets are ex
pected to be tjall and stately and
I am neither.
“Yes,” I repeat, “I was Elijah
that night.”
This is how it happened that
all at once I became Elijah. It was
at the seder of the late Rabbi
Feinberg in our town. For a num
ber of years my venerable father
♦ (he is 96 now) was invariably a
guest at Rabbi Feinberg's seder.
Now Rabbi Feinberg’s seder
never Was one of those quick
streamlined affairs of the Jewish
reformation. By the Reform ritual
the service of the seder is ever
practically in no time, and the
family is starting on the first
course of the Passover meal. Rab
bi Feinberg made a kind of religi
ous and historical exegesis out of
it. He sat at the head of the table
in his embroidery garnished white
robe and almost at every passage
of the ritual he paused to give a
discoursed explanation. So it was
far after midnight when a Fein
berg seder was over.
That night (that is to say, the
night I turned oui to be Elijah,
you might say) at 12:30 a. m., I
drove to Rabbi Feinberg's house
to lake my father home. Hours
before I had completed my own
reformed seder in my house.
(Continued on Page 9)
Miami To Have
New Hebrew School
MIAMI BEACH, (JTA) A
new site to a
modern school building with
room for 500 children has been
acquired by the Hebrew Acad
emy here, it was announced
this week. The academy now
nas 200 children in attendance.
The projected new edifice will
nave a library, gymnasium and
science laboratories in addition
to classroom^.
Jewish Publishers
Meet’ In New York
<
Leading publishers of the
American-Jewish press today ex
pressed their opposition to the
McCarran-W alter Immigration
bill now pending before the U. S.
Senate. Meeting in the Hotel
Astor in New York City, for their
ninth annual convention, the
American Association of English-
Jewish Newspapers, of which The
Southern Jewish Weekly is a
member, in a resolution called for
the defeat of the bill, which has
come under sharp attack for its
racial and totalitarian provisions.
The resolution also stated that if
approved, President Truman be
asked to veto the bill.
U. S. Urges Germany To Reach
Settlement With Israel
WASHINGTON. (JTA) High Commissioner John J. McCloy
has made representations at Bonn on behalf of a mutually satisfac
tory settlement of Israel-German negotiations it was learned here
this week.
The State Department had pre
viously made it known that the
American Government regards
Germany under a moral obli
gation to see the negotiations
through to a successful conclusion
and that the U. S. is anxious for
this to occur. Government offi
cials expect that the coming week
will furnish evidence to show
whether or not Germany has any
real intention of making amends.
The British (Government, ac
cording to Washington officials,
THE CASE OF SHOLEM ASCH
BY NATHAN ZIPRIN
Sholem Asch seemingly hoped to utilize
his recent visit to Israel as a means of reha
bilitating himself in the Jewish world. But
his double-talk there only intensified the
question mark about his religious orientation.
His contention that he was being malign
ed by Jews for seeking what he termed a
“rapproachement” between .“two brothers”
was lacking both in conviction and sincerity.
We are all striving toward the improvement
and betterment of Jewish-Christian relations,
but not at the price Asch seems to suggest in
his novels on Christian themes.
Asch said he was “convinced that all our
troubles came from isolation.” Since he made
the assertion in connection with what he com
plained was the penalty he was paying “for
JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA, FRIDAY, MAY 23, 1952
BOY REJOINS
LOST PARENTS
WITH USNA AID
I
Eliezer Levin, 11, arrives at Idlewild
Airport from Israel enroute to join his
parents and 5-year-old sister he has
never seen in Louisville, Ky., where Mr.
and Mrs. Samuel Lewin were resettled
in 1949 by United Service for New
A.nericans. Through the cooperation of
tit. vC agencies financed by the United
Jewish Appeal, Eliezer was located in a
foster home in Israel where he had been
placed after the war by Youth Aliyah
along with thousands of other un
attached and orphaned children. The
Joint Distribution Committee found
that the boy was indeed the Lewins’
lost son and arranged his flight, while
U.S.N.A. made immigration and re
settlement arrangements here.
<•
has adopted a position similar to
that of the State Department. The
British are sympathetic toward a
successful solution of the claims
question. The French Government
is believed to hold a similar View.
An Israel note, explaining the
background for Israel’s claims,
was presented on March 12, 1951,
to the U. S., Britain, France, and
the Soviet Union. The Soviet
Union neither replied to the note
nor acknowledged it.
4
writing my books,” the assumption is inevita
ble that he intended the term “isolation” to
denote religious rather than social separate
ness. Presumably then Asch’s cure for this
type of “isolation” is conjoining with the
majority faith and forgiving a synthesis out
of the historic and basic antithesis. Simply
speaking, Asch again advocates the discred
ited Judeo-Christian equation.
If this great novelist wishes to relinquish,
or render innocuous, the basic tenets of Ju
daism for the sake of getting along with the
world, it is his privilege to do so whether the
motivation is cowardice or conviction. We to
whom “kiddush hashem” is more than a mere
theme for a novel are not prepared to take
the road of least resistance —the road to spir
itual and religious perdition.
Anti - Semitism Seen
In Present Politics
BY MILTON FRIEDMAN
(Copyright, 1952, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Inc.)
* * WASHINGTON—
The Presideniial race has ignited anti-Semitic agitation "which
may penetrate into the broader areas of American life." according
to a report unanimously adopted by the executive branch of the
American Jewish Committee. This report held that on the basis of
evidence in our hands, the use of anti-Semitism as a political in
strumentality is currently being stepped up significantly." While
Jewish organizations are taking a more serious view of developments,
a Senate subcommittee on elections has embarked on an investigation
of the injection of bigotry into national and state political campaigns.
Supreme Court's
Group Libel Ruling
Is Challenged
WASHINGTON, (JTA) The
American Civil Liberties Union
this week challenged a U. S. Su
preme Court decision upholding
the legality of state laws against
“group libel” and petitioned the
court for rehearing of the case of
Joseph Beauharnais whose con
viction under the Illinois group
libel law had been upheld by the
nation’s highest tribunal.
The ACLU, dissociating itself
from Beauharnais’ views, said
that the court decision had result
ed in “momentous implications”
on points not fully argued. The
court decision held that utterances
libelling groups are not within the
area of constitutionally protected
speech. This contention, the
ACLU asserted, “was not pressed
on the court in briefs or in oral
argument.
“The question thus decided
without argument is a monumen
tal one,” the Union’s petition for
re-hearing said. “This decision
sustains the constitutionality of all
state criminal libel laws, indivi
dual and group, in the absence of
a clear and present danger—all
this without a hearing having
been had on this issue, and with
out any prior holding by the court
to this effect.”
$3.00 A YEAR
A number of Defense Depart
ment officials indicated concern
when the discredited hate cam
paign against Assistant Secretary
of Defense Anna Rosenberg was
revived by backers of Sen. Robert
A. Taft. Headquarters of the Taft
for-President movement circu
lated petitions “demanding” that
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower answer
21 specified questions. Questions
14 and 15 asked: “If nominated
and elected will you clean house
in the State Department, begin
ning with Dean Acheson? . . . Will
you do likewise in the Defense
Department beginning with Mrs.
Anna Rosenberg, now manpower
expert?
These questions were published
throughout the country. Although
they were displayed in the win
dow of Taft's Washington head
quarters, a spokesman for the
Senator said Taft "had no know
ledge" of the question involving
Mrs. Rosenberg.
The A.J.C. report maintained
that anti-Semitism today “has the
status of a sort of an outlawed
weapon in the political arsenal,”
and that “it is employed only
when conventional weapons and
tactics seem inadequate to assure
victory, and then only by guer
rilla forces not subject to direct
control by high commands.”
"Political manifestations of
anti-Semitism." said the report,
"have a delayed reaction. They
are officially disclaimed and pub
licly condemned. But there is al
ways present the possibility of a
coalition of various anti-Semitic
groups and certain other t ele
ments, whose main objectives may
happen to coincide in some popu
lar movement. We must stand on
constant guard against such a pos
sibility."
The Washington Post,* after a
careful study of. anti-Semitic in
fluences in election activity, re
ported that “the lunatic fringe of
the extreme right-wing—the pro-
Fascist, plus ultra isolationist,
‘white supremacy,’ anti-Semitic
press—has been pouring it on in
mounting volume in recent
weeks.” The Post said of “hate
merchants” that “by and large,
they like Sen. Robert A. Taft and
Gen. Douglas MacArthur, but
mostly they don’t like Ike.”
The director of the Washington
office of the B'nai B'rith Anti-
Defamation League has written
that "some of the people who
have decided that Eisenhower is
(Continued on Page 4)