Ns« 4 TheCanadton Jewhh N«wi, Friday,.Stpfembtr 13th. 190
THE CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS
PUBLISHED EVERY FRIDAY BY ON PUBLISHERS LIMITED
MAIN EDITORIAL AND BUSINESS OFFICES:
1218 Eglinton Ave. W, Toronto (10), Ont. ' Telephone RU. 9-1895
J. IRVING OELBAUM, MEYER W. GASNER, Publishers MORRY WINGOLD, Secretary-Treosurer
. BOARD OF DIRECTORS: J. Irving 0«lbaam,Pmrdrat; Mark A. Uvy, Vfeo-PresMent; kolmon Borgor, Stopan Borgot, John D. Flonborg, Bart Godfroyi D. Uy Hortis, M. B. Kaufman, Samnal J. Kohier, Jostph Uvine, Un Lockshin, Dorothy C^ Nuranborgar, Shiamai Ogdah, David Peters, Ahrin B. Rotonbarg, Sorhual J. Sable, Max Tohanbaum, Woyno Tonenboum, Leon E. We!n-itain, Roy D. Wolfe, Somaal Wottsmon.
. Hy Bassin (Ottowo), Henry Blatt (Montreal)
^ M. J. NURENBERGER, Editor
VOL. IvTnO. 37 (194)
Subscriptions: $5.00 per year, $12 -- 3 years; U.S.A: S7.50 per year, $18.00 3 yeors; All other countries: $10 per yeor, $24 ^ 3 years.
Authorized As Second Class Moll, Post Office Department, Ottawa and for payment of postage in cash. CANADA'S LEADING JEWISH NEWSPAPER IN ENGLISH
When Arab Disunity Threatens —- Turn to fsrqel
MURER & THE AUSTRIAN COURTS
CONGRESS PROTESTS
The Austrian Ambassador to Ottawa, in replying to the Canadian Jewish Congress' expression of concern s^ainst the acquittal of a former Gestapo offi< cial (Franz Murer) by a jury in Graz, stated that the protest has been forwarded to the competent authorities in Austria. The Ambassador also said : "In this connection, I should like to point out that the Public Prosecution had lodged an appeal against the acquittal arrived at by the jury in Graz,
FIGHTING THE DEAD
an appeal being admissible against an acquitting verdict according to Austrian criminal procedure. Consequently the case is at present before the Federal Supreme Court in Vienna which will have to determine whether the ori-ginal acquittal remains in force, or not".
Murer was the Eichmann of the Vilna ghetto.
His acquittal has raised serious questions about the democratic atmosphere in present-day Austria.
the news
By KV'BEN
ALGEMEEN HANDELSBIAD. AMSTERDAM
PUPPT LOVE IN MONTREAL A recent Issue of the New statesman, a London polftical and literary weekly, carried a vignette by Mordecal Richler called. Making It With The Chicks which describes puppy love among Jewish adolescents in the Montreal of Richler's boyhood. It Is puzzling to contemplate why the New Statesman, a publication of taste and sophistication, chose to carry as banal; and trite story of pid)9rtal and pre-pubertal schoolboyisms as has been, put to paper, including the. ineviteblo double-entehdre of Helena Ru-benstein and Max Factor and the purple passages from. How To Kiss "Tour Girl.
The boyhood sex-frustrations of Mordecai Richlier's characters leave this reader quite indifferent. LAKE KRAKAUER' SASKATCHEWAN The late Dr.Charles Krakauer of Toronto, who was killed in action with the Canadian forces in Italy in 1943, has had a Canadian lake named after him. It
Is located In the Lac La Rouge area about 180 miles north of Prince Albert, Sask and will be called Lake Krakauer. Captain Krakauer, who was in the medical corps, graduated from. the medical school of the University of Toronto In 1938.
LAURA STERN . Many Toronto and. Hamilton residents were grieved to learn last week of the suddeii death of the youthful Laura (Rubinstsin) Stem, wife of social worker William Stem, and mother of two children. Her husband was just about to start his new duties as executive director of the Jewish Center and Community Council of Hamilton when, only two days before he was to begin, tragedy struck. His friends who knew and know him in the UJA; Welfare Fund, Holy Blossom Temple Social Action Committee, University SiBttlement, Canadian As-soliation of Social Workers, (and in Hamilton where the Sterns previously lived for four years) all moum his loss with him.
By Mordecai Hirshenson
STALINISM IN DEATH
It is, perhaps, no surprise that the Soviet drive against Judaism should include the dead together with the living. '
This is no less characteristic of official Soviet attitudes than their rigorously enforced line over interpretation of ancient history on the importance they attach to the "rehabilitation" of some victims and the posthiunous degradation of others.
To the official Soviet mind the de-. sire for separate burial facilities ex-emplifies "nationalism".
They resent this desire of the Jews to put themselves apart from their Gentile compatriots in death no less than in life.
It cannot be expected that Soviet officialdom should appreciate Jewish ri-
PUBUC OPINION & STRIA
tual in life and death. What can, how ever, be hoped for is that from outside and inside the Soviet Union efforts will be made to convince its leaders that they have nothing to lose and even something to gain by allowing the Jews their religious requirements.
Jews will not really be made more loyal by forcing them to lie with Christians and atheists even in death
The emotional and intellectual inflexibility which attempts to make them do so is not really a source of strength.
The Russian people as well as the Jews suffered much imder Stalin. Attitudes like this, intended to suppress dangerous nonconformities, are at the basis of Stalinism.
ENCYCLOPEDIA PATRONS 60 YEARS AGO
Who were the Jews in Toronto and Montreal 50 years ago who were interested enough and who possessed the minimum means to be patrons of the Jewish Encyclopedia in English, — started in 1900 and completed 5 years later by the Funk and Wagnalls — now a classic? The list as printed in the last volume (number 12)
provides an interesting group of names revealing who comprised the intellec-tualleadership of these communities two generations ago.
These were men who in all likelihood either paid in advance for their encyclopedia set or contributed a deposit as a token that they would purchase it on publication. There are 31 names from Toronto including Frank
MORAL VICTORY FOR ISRAEL
From The New York Times editorial: "Israel and the West won a victory for morality in the United Nations Security Council, even if the Soviet Union did have the final word in vetoing the indirect condemnation of Syria for the "wanton murder" of two young Israeli fanners on the Israel-Syria frontier.
"The final 8-2 vote in the Council, with only Morocco joining Moscow against the United States-British resolution and Venezuela abstaining, indicated the abhorrence with which most of the world viewed this misdeed. It was, incidentally, the 101st time that tiie Soviet Union has exercised its veto to thwart the majority will.
Unsatisfactory as the upshot must be to Israel, it would be a tragic error for the Government of Premier Levi Esh-kol to return to the old policy of im-mediate and heavy retaliation against border incidents without fecourse to the UJI. Israel has gained in world esteem by its restraint, even if its plea for condemnation did not win in the CouncU."
From The Toronto Telegram:
"Should the Arabs wish to know why there is sympathy and admiration for Israel among Western nations, they have only to look at the evidence uncovered in the U-N Security Council on the incident that sparked the latest , Syrian-Israeli exchange of fire.
"Two 19-year-old Israeli farmers from the border settlement of Almagor were ambushed and killed by Syrian infiltrators. American delegate Adlai E. Stevenson calls this wanton murder. It is nothing less.
".. .In their vengeful cynicism, the Syrians must gnash their teeth over this reaction, but they have themselves to blame. They cannot go on using Israel as a scapegoat for their internal troubles and expect civilized nations to remain neutral to the a;trocities.
"The Syrian delegate to the U-N says the evidence at Almagor was faked, but this weaseling will get him nowhere. Britain, the U.S., Bradl and others; say otherwise, and decent men everywhere will know how to judge kidnappers and murderers."
marginal notes KAFKA AND AGNOIV
By Oscar Bersor>
Apparently we have overlooked two important Ih terary dates. In Israel those who know, literature are celebrating the seventy-fifth birthday of S. J. Agnon who is still in the prime of creativeness.In Europe, some literary journals mention the fact that Franz Kafka would have been eighty-years old this summer had he not succumbed at the age of forty-one.
* -k *
To the connoisseur of belles lettres, it may seem odd for me to associate these two literary dates. For what connectian can there Berbetween-the-old man of Hebrew letters, the jifknowledged master, of the Hebrew novel, and the Bohemian genius of Prague? However, I admit that this Kafka-Agnon marriage is not the product of my own itnagination. It was^ brought to my attention by Edmund Wilson who, years ago, wrote in the New Yorker that he can't decide who of the two is greater. According to Wilson (who reads Hebrew) it is difficult to tell whether Agnon is as great as Kafka orKafka as remarkable as Agnon.
* * * '
In my opinion, America's leading critic has captured the most characteristic trait of both, the Hebrew story teller and the Czech Jew who penned his tales in German: their Jewishness — optimism within the tragic.
It is difficult to imagine a writer more Jewish than Franz Kafka Who of us has forgotten his TRIAL: the "shUmieV' symbolizing the helpless man of our time wJw doesn't understand the judges and their motives? Who has not grasped the prophecy of gloom of the concentration camp world which Kafka depicted?
* * *. ■ .
Whenever I read Agnon or Kafka, and try to comprehend their profound humaneness, their pity of man's plight, I recall ivhat a Hasidic rabbi is quoted to have stated at the destruction of European-Jewry: I am sorry for God that he has to see THIS...
A CHRIiSTIABr m WARSAW
By PATRICK O'DONOVAN
A
WARSAW, Poland (CJN P). — Among the cities of the world, Warsaw is set apart This Was a place of death, vwhere n.c.o.'s li^tly emptied trams to fill their quota of executions. It is a plage that makes a nonsense of all. the pretensions of the
Mr. Patrick O'Donovon of tK» London Observer visited Warsaw intbe spring during tlie Ghetto observance. TheFollowing is port-of_Qn essay written especially for th« JCNS ond the Conodiah Jewish News .
West. It is, despite its Government, perhaps the most-Christian city in the West. It-^s also a place where no Christian can be quite easy. I dare hot think what it must mean to Jews. '
Warsaw a ro s e f o u r times against the Germans. One of the rising was Jewish. None of them much affected the course of the war.
. This city was destroyed.
The Germans, did everything except sow salt here. Humanity stopped here. They fought for three days in the "ruins" of the Cathedral. Girls on the way to lunch will show you which sewer cover they used as an entrance to the freedom of the underground. London, Coventry, Dover and__ that sweet well-bombed countryside that lies between France and our seat of
Is It True?
nize
Haifa, (JCNS) - The Neturei BHarta (Guardians of the City) — Jerusalem's ultra-Orthtidox Jewish sect— have agreed {for the first time in their history to slaughter catUi^ In a Jewlsh/ab. battolr. ■ \;... . ■ /
The sect — which hs«''never recognised the existence of. the Jewish State and firmly .believes that the real Jewish State will only be established with the
advent of the Messiah — has up to now used only Arab abbat-tolrs at the Galilee township of Shfar Am and at Nazareth, not recognising the kashrut of even the' niost Orthodox groups.
Because of this, the Neturei Karta were paying much higher prices for their meat — sometimes 20 per cent more than the normal kosher price for Israel as a whole. This was due to the
cost of transporting the cattle to dlstatit abbatolrs and then bringing the meat \o Jerusalem.
Now, under an agreement Just signed with the / management of the slaughterhpuse at Kfar Ata. the Neturei Karta have
began to slaughter' cattle in a Jewish abbatolr, thus creating a revolutionary development In' the life of the Jerusalem sect.
power, none of them offer parallel to Warsaw. This was a different dimension.
I am a Christian and I come of a guilty faith. I am diminished by what the Germans did here. When I go to India or Malaya I try to suggest that the West is yet a, gentle place, they, the coloured ones, include Warsaw and Auschwitz in our civilisation and achievement.
So we. have been celebrating the 20th anniversary of the furious resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto. There is a monument to these 60,000 survivors of the 500,000 crowded into this; ordinary place, to the 60,000 who in the end turned and fought with no thought of survival. It stands in a huge square. Bare, scraped and empty. A child could tell that something terrible happened here.
The 60.000 died almost
to a man and woman. The ghetto, when it was a district of Warsaw where Jews preferred to live, was a respectable place. It was built, of heavy stone. It had heavy balconies and dark doorways. It smelled of rich food. It was Marylebone and Kensington. It was Bermond-sey and it had a touch of Wbitechapel, and most of the people who lived here simply could hot believe that men could do what men in fact did.
The monument stands ii^ this windy square. The architecture around it is clearly that of a people's : democracy pushed f^rca-pital and marble. Tjie old place which the Germans turned into a prison, a sort of perversion of a few city streets, allj this has gone. War, the Germans, the Poles after the wair, have taken a seraph er arid the ghetto has gone. There is simply that monument.
D. Benjamin (an Australian-bom Jew who later left to live in England); Edmund Scheuer who lived to be Toronto Jewry's "grand old man"; Rabbi Solomon Jacobs of Holy Blossom Synagogue; Mark Geldzae hler, Hebrew educator and Torah reader of the same congregation; S. Sunonsky, father of Forest Hill Village's former reeve; Louise Levinsky, one of the founders of the Bnmswick Avenue Talmud Torah; Louis Gelber, now 85, the woollen importer and community leader, only survivor of the illustrious group.
Other names of subscribers whom the writer recognizes as related to present day Jewish Torontonians were: Ike (sic) Brodey, Mark Cohen, B. Danson, Henry Fogler, L. Gtu-ofsky, Rev. I. Halpern, Paul Levi, S. Lurie, J. Singer Ephraim Palter, Charies Stone. Other names that may be familiar to readers are: Maurice Cohen, M. Frankel, S. Fremer, Rev. Louis H. Jordan, Sa-mud Lewis, Oscar B. Rose, Ernest and Julius Saunders.
E. E. Sheppard, Jacob Tap-litzki, Louis Waldman.
A PATRON FROM RAT PORTAGE
The city of Montreal provided 68 names which is not surprising in view of the greater discrepancy which then obtained as between the two cities, when Montreal's Jewry outnumbered Toronto's by more than two to one. There were two names from Hamilton: W. Goldberg and Frank Wolfe; one from Berlin (later kitchener): H. S. Hallman; two from Saint John, N. B: Samuel Rabinowitz and A. Pbyas; one from Quebec City: Louis Silverman; three from Ottawa: A. Harris, I. Slomensky, and E. Pullan— the same Elias Pullan who later moved back to Toronto.
WHO WAS J. F. MCLAUGHLIN?
The name Samuel D. Schultz is identified with Vancouver. This Mr. Schultz later became "a judge, but the family intermarried and is now lost to Jewry. Niver-ville, Manitoba is represent ed by a Louis Serkau. Most intriguing of all is the fascinating entry which reads Rat Portage, Canada (ho province mentioned)—Alexander Shragg. Another question is prompted by the name J. F. McLaughlin appearing among,.the Toronto patrons who was he?
Winnipeg, despite the 1,-156 Jews who lived there in 1901, is hot mentioned in the list. The Montreal names include such familiar ones as Lyon Cohen, later to be the first president of ■ Canadian Jewish Congress; S. W. Jacobs, later to be a long-term Member of Parliament; S. Kellert; A. Pierce (father of the present Canadian diplomat?) the De Solas; David Sperber; etc.
. Of the three libraries in Canada who ordered copies of the Encyclopedia 63 years ago (it must be remembered it was the first such work to appear in the Enghsh language), one. was from Quebec City (the Quebec
Legislative Library), and two were from Toronto (the Public Library and the Uni yersjty Library).
BAYARD RUSTEM IN TORONTO
The man behind the scenes in the recent March on Washington of America's Negroes was Bayard Rus-tem. Rustem was the organizer who looked after the planning and arrangements for the historic move. Some Torontonians will remember him from the time he visited this city back in 1948 or 49. He appeared as speaker at a function of the National Council of Jewish Women held at their House on St. George Street.
The meeting was held to popularize what was then a bold and untried idea for Canada — a Sair Employment Practices law. which would outlaw race discrimination in jobs. The meeting ers.
was called by the National Council and Canadian Jewish Congress also had a part in it. It was attended by representatives of other faiths and was part of the campaign which finally culminated in the enactment of such a law only two or three years later in 1951.
Rustem was then sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, . a pacifist group believing in nonviolent action. He has just completed a trip through the South in which whites and Negroes travelled together in interstate busses in order to test the federal law that had banned Jim Crow practices in inter-state bus travel. This was the ancestor of the Freedom Rid-
SERMON FOR THE WEEK'
IDERSTANDING AND ABSORM
/ Preaching iii Jabneh in the first century Eleazar ben Azariah drew attention to a verse in our Scriptural Reading this week which, he felt, required elucidation. "Assemble the people;" it runs, "men, women and children." We can understand, argues Eleazar, why-the-men were invited to the Public Reading of the Torah (Hak-hel). They were expected to study. The women would listen. But why the children? "That those who brought them might receive a reward."
We can ignore the (formerly) understandable if (currentlyJ regrettable downgrading of wc men in this homily. What interests us far more is Eleazar's attitude towards the children. The point about those bringing them receiving a reward unequivocally underlines their status. They are below the age of reason and within the age of rumpus.
Clearly, Eleazar never served as Rabbi of a typical family congregation nor preached a sermon nor read the Torah in the presence of "reward bringing" children. He was the Rabbi's Rabbi. Not for him the harsh social exigencies of suburbia and provincialia. He preached to a conr gregation of his peers — "in" the Rabbinical Academy "to" Rabbis.
Yet there is often something in the wisdom stemming from the Rabbinical ivory tower which confutes the harsh facts of life. We ha;ve reacted against the theoretical wisdom of the ancients in Judaism nowhere more than in this sphere. Whether it be junior congregations of Jewish education which terminates at Bar Mitzva, we are in the presence of what might be best described as infantilism — seeing the Jewish religion through the* eyes of children, and, primarily, children who are totally unable to grasp the basic concepts of a mature Jewish approach to-
wards life. ' ■. . .
It is the corollary of a bankrupt adult Jewish society, and when the experts can finally be pur-suaded to put down their statistics and consider the problem, they will almost certainly argue that the system cannot be as bad as all that, because the argue that the system cannot be as bad as all that, because the children bring the parents along and isn't that just too marvellous.
Pricisely the antithesis of the sequence suggested by Eleazar ben Azariah with whom, we .regretT we must agree. A rich Jewish life, Uke any other rich life, starts with a-rich adult life. Of course there was much at fault with the pre-modem view which saw children as miniature adults. There is, however, much more at fault, with the current view in which adults are seen as glorified children. .
- Perhaps Eleazar knew this. Perhaps he knew that precisely in those rich situations growing out of healthy family and group life, such as the Public Assembly described by our Torah reading this week, the child absorbs far more by a process of spiritual ozmosis —even when he makes a little noise — than by any other process.
Surely, those who, from a rich personal and family experience, bring along their children, receive a reward. The reward of knowing that one transmits the richness of Jewish life and the joy of being a Jew to those who, precisely because/ they do not admit of communication at a merely, rational level, absorbs the eternal message in its maturest form into the deepest well, springs '^f their being.