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It sometimes seems that it would have been preferable had Kurt Waldheim personally been on board Explorer — the interstellar space craft how
wending its way through aeons of dark matter in outer space — than a mere recording of his voice broadcasting a greeting of peace to any galactic civilizations that might be within the reception arc.
The man who offered the peace greeting to the universe when he was the U.N. secretary general decades ago will not let anyone on earth have peace: every year a new controversy erupts about his role in the Balkans as an intelligence officer for the German army.
This year his name (and that of his mf&) has surfaced because of a "knighthood'* he received from the Vatican. This honor came to Waldheim because of work he has done on behalf of the Catholic Church. It is a symbolic gesture of great significance because it conveys a kind of hechsher, an imprimatur on the man.
But as A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times has observed: if the knighthood signals forgiveness for Waldheim because of his checkered past, does one not have the right to ask whether contrition is
involved? Has Waldheim ever apologized for the ignominious role he played, even indirectly, in the massacre of partisans in Yugoslavia in World War H?
Since there is no evidence of Waldheim having become a ba*al teskuvah, it must be assumed that the Pope's investiture was done in spite of Wald-heim's sanctimonious and arrogant refusal to admit wrong-doing. This has led Rosenthal to say: "What the Pope did was staggering. He honored the one man who had come to be known throughout the world as symbolizing all the informed, participating, unpunished witnesses."
In this speech of rapprochement between Israel and the Vatican, between Catholics and Jews, it is difficult to swallow this indecent act. In the future it will form part of that sad record of the Church in its relationship with the Jewish people.
However, if Jews and Judaism could survive the Inquisition, the Catholic-sponsored explusion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the Mortara case and Pius Xllth's studied ambivalence towards the Holocaust — they can also survive this silly and empty gesture towards Kurt Waldheim.
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By CHERYL COHEN
It was the first day of 1994 school year in British Columbia. Excited children in new clothes clutched their bright new supplies. Teenagers, sharing summer stories, eyeing the changes in themselves and their buddies, vied for the "best" locker.
In 1994 my child had to miss out on an event that even now, as an adult, I recall nostalgically. For this year the High Holiday season began the day after Labor Day and my child was unable to accompany his peers to share in the *Tirst day of school** as he remained with his family to celebrate Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year.
Certain other Provinces chose to take a stand for multi-culturalism and deferred the start of the school and/or university year by two days. I did hear the argument that the "Christmas vacation" in December could be slightly shortened and 5ri7/enable the majority population to prepare for and celebrate its annual festive season to the fullest. Fm not referring here to two weeks but an accommodation of one or two days. Or the children begin their 1995 summer vacation one or two days later. "Where there's a will there is a way**.
I was stil! struggling with the implications of ail this when I learned that the critically important first annual general meeting of CSS E A (Community Social Services Employer's
Association) — a crucial component ot the new government-created Public Sector Employers Council (PSEC) — is scheduled to begin on Yom Kippur, the most sacred date of our Jewish calendar.
I feel frustrated by both these situations, understanding that they reflect a society that "talks the talk" but is not yet too practised in "walking the walk" of genuine multicultural-ism. I am, however, even more saddened by the degree to which so many of us simply accept and accommodate to this situation.
D@lt® resident Cheryl Cohen Is the mother of torn
to life imprisonment, \w of paiole, for passing tion to Israel.
has bmn
How many Jewish students and teachers showed up at school on Sept. 6? How many of my colleagues, understandably pressured by the dilemma, continually attend the myriad of important meetings, conferences, training opportunities and symposia that seem, inevitably, to be scheduled on Shabbat (on a Saturday), if not on a key Jewish holiday, as in this instance? What is the cost to our ability to live both a full professional life and a meaningful Jewish life?
I believe that if we are committed to seeing things change, not only for ourselves, valuing our Jewish religion, culture and heritage, but also for other cultures and religious groups, then we have to be prepared to take a stand.
I am now choosing not to attend certain events and functions scheduled on days special or sacred to us, as Jews. And I am choosing to share my experiences, feelings and hopes, as in this column, for I believe it is only through such sharing that the "majority culture" will become more aware, more sensitive to the reality of other cultures, and more prepared to take this issue seriously.
At such a time we may begin to see true multiculturalism; a time when all cultures have the space and respect to live and celebrate true to their beliefs and heritage.
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recogoiae that Ftollard's no way its his crime. A mllective ;e at his excessive sentence - letters, and phone calls - can make a
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By MELVIN FENSON
JERUSALEM — Recently a group of 30 gentlemen farmers from Gujurat State in India visited Israel as guests of two government ministries. In Jerusalem they were taken over as guests by the Servas organization, an international home hospitality association that gives members free accommodation abroad (plus dinner, breakfast, and above all conversation) in return for the same services you extend to foreign guests who visit your country. It is the only way I know of travelling in a foreign country and really meeting the people, beyond hotel staff and retail clerks.
I became involved because the Jerusalem chairman of Servas hosting was going abroad, and asked me to "make a few phone calls." Needless to say, the task mushroomed to the point where one night I -accommodated eight Gujuratis (all sur- i,| named Patel... I thought I was in Steinb- ^fl^' ach, Manitoba). ^^0^
Among the most impressive sights in Israel many of the 30 mentioned to me was their pride at seeing Gandhi's photo on the wall in Ben Gurion's "hut" at Sde Boker in the Negev. Gandhi's attraction for the liberals of a lost generation has no equal today. FEMSON
My Indian guests were especially impressed because their Gujarat State was Gandhi's home state, the setting for his ashram^ site of his salt march to the sea in defiance of British tax laws.
I had a bone to pick with Gandhi for exactly 50 years, and never found the right opportunity to set the record straight. It was not because he became the inspiration of the intifada. The stone-throwers of the West Bank and Gaza never heard of Gandhi, (as the Gujaratis never heard of the Holocaust).
But the man who triggered the intifada was a Mennonite Arab therapist. Mubarak Awad, whose call for civil disobedience and passive resistance — the classic political stock in trade of the Indian resistance movement — set off an eight-year struggle ending in murders, and weapons replacing
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