Our 60th Year
Since 1930 the only weekly publication serving Jewry of the Pacific Northwest
An Independent Newspaper
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief SAMUEL KAPLAN
Advertising Manager RONFREEDMAN
_News Desk _ ETHAN MINOVITZ
Wednesday, October 3/1990
Published every Thursday by. Anglo-Jewish Publishers Ltd.
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Soviet society
A Soviet film called Taxi Blues, directed by Pavel Lungen, is a confirmation both of the new openness in Russian society and the pervasiveness of a vulgar anti-Semitism.
The film, the story of a strange friendship between an alcoholic Jewish jazz musician and a narrow-minded taxi driver (the movie was scheduled to open In, he United States on Oct. 1), probes deeply the irrational hatred against Jews now being ventilated in Soviet society. In the film the taxi driver accuses his musician friend of having turned Russians into beasts of burden and of controlling the lives of the Russian people.
The taxi driver's lament regrettably is not merely a feature of popular anti-Semitism. The problem is that in Russia today anti-Semitism is not a phenomenon of the lunatic fringe or the periphery. One of the most perfervid anti-Semites operating in the Soviet Union today is Valentin Rasputin^a member of Mikhail Gorbachev's presidential council.
Rasputin has argued that Jews masterminded the Bolshevik Revolution and are responsible for the decades of terror that followed. Rasputin's views, adopted by the nationalist Pamyat group, have unfortunately infected a growing segment of Russian society.
That infection has even reached the critic who was assigned to review Pavel Lungen's Taxi Blues, Rsls-tislav Yurenev writing in Sovetskaya Kulktura, accused Lungen of using French and American money to make a film which deliberately exaggerated the seamy side of Soviet life in order to pander to the anti-Russian bias of the West.
Yurenev does not seem to understand that a truthful depiction of Soviet anti-Semitism, a pathology which threatens to undo the progress achieved by Gorbachev, is not an exercise in anti-Soviet posturing but a cri de coeur designed to bring the Russian people to its senses.
Jews of U.S/Canada able to fund housing for Soviet oiim
By IRVING MOSKOWITZ
There is a growing feeling that however the Persian Gulf crisis is finally resolved, Israel will be presented with the bill. It was already being prepared in Washington even before Saddam Hussein rolled his tanks into Kuwait. While James Baker III was leaving his phone number for us to call when we got serious about "peace," his State Department was putting a new spin on that much-abused word by refusing to make good on a promised U.S. guarantee of a $400 million loan Israel negotiated to purchase temporary housing for a Soviet^Jewish aliyah that has now reached 15,000 per month. "
The State Department said that since this money was "fungible," it would not provide the guarantee until and unless Israel could demonstrate that the funds would not be used for construction of housing in Judea and Samaria. ,
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Or. irving Moskowitz of Long Beach, California is a member of tfie board of governors of Americans For a Safe Israel.
The tune from Foggy Bottom has since become more strident. The pretext for refusing to guarantee the loan having been exposed as a straw man by clear evidence that Israel never intended using the funds for housing outside the Green Line, the Bakerites are now revealing their true hand. As a precondition for the loan guarantee they are demanding that Israel permanently suspend all further development activity^in Judea and Samaria, irrespective of any relationship to Soviet Jews. In other words, a total and permanent freeze on Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel.
Israeli accession to this unconscionable demand would be tantamount to a surrender to the intifada and its PLO directors. Morever, it would be the prelude to the next inevitable demand — that Israel begin dismantling existing settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza so that Washington can "balance the books" with the Ariabs for their magnanimity in permitting us to save them from the tender mercies of the Butcher of Baghdad.
This is not a price Israel can pay and still survive,
In saying no to Washington, we must turn to our Jewish resources to solve the problem of housing the Soviet-Jewish olim. That is as it should be. The post-Gorbachev aliyah is a Jewish miracle and its resettlement in Israel a Jewish responsi-
bility that this generation of Jews has been privileged to carry out. The private resources at our disposal are vast. There are scores of Jews in the U.S. and Canada individually capable of underwriting the $400 million loan. But to ask them to assume the burden would be to effectively exclude our collective participation in an effort that must involve the Jews as a people.
The 6.5 million Jews of the U.S. and Canada certainly have, the means at their disposal to meet the challenge. It resides in the capital potential of the equity in their collective religious and institutional real estate holdings — synagogues, community centres, yeshivas, day schools, YMHAs, federation buildings, , etc.;
With the leading and wealthier members of each institution acting as guarantors, this real estate empire is capable of many times the $400 million. Billions will be needed to house and create jobs for Russian olim, in the form of bank loans, proceeds bonds at 7.5 percent. Thepnly cost to the lenders would be the difference between tlie interest on their loans and the 7.5 percent they would receive on the Israel bonds. But that is something the Jewish community at large ought to be able to handle.
Such an investment by the Jewish people in their Jewish state is, in the final analysis, the only form of Jewish wealth that has any reality. All other Jewish wealth over the past 2,000 years has
HOUSING-Page 13
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Past time for ROMP to lay charges in Provost
ByARNOLDAGES
The nighttime cross-burning cum anti-Semitic hate-in played out by supporters of the Aryan Nations and the Ku Klux Klan in Provost, Alberta was the most disturbing example of thuggish race hatred seen in Canada since the days of Adrien Arcand's anti-Semitic marches in Quebec in the 1930s.
The Alberta event did one better than Arcand's marches, however, thanks to the CBCs national coverage of the score of uniformed bigots who were shown walking around a huge burning cross, shouting, among other things,-"Death to the Jews." This was Provost, Alberta, 1990 not Nazi Germany, 1933.
The chilling portrait of race hatred presented by the CBC was complemented by an interview with Provost's mayor; he refused to turn down a donation made by the .Aryan Nations' front organization to a fund being collected for the construction of a community centre in the town. The mayor doesn't believeJthat money had any odor.
He errs. Accepting money from instigators of race hatred is an affront to the conscience not only of^lbertans biit also of all Canadians. Thousands of Canadian soldiers died-in World War -II to fight the uniform and the swastika symbol obscenely deployed by the rabble-rousing racists in Provost. Accepting donations from the latter is a repudiation of the sacrifice of those Canadians who fell in combat.
Canadians cannot abide the spectacle of racist agitators in Alberta or any where else in Canada calling for violence against Jews. That incitement may begin with the Jews, as history has shown us, but it will not end with the Jews.
The criminal code of this country has statutes prohibiting the display and dissemination of hatred likely to cause civil unrest. That unrest has already been precipitated by activities of the Aryan Nations and its stooges.
It is time for the RCMP to lay charges.
Arnold Ages is a ragular JIVB reviewer and contributor. He is an author. Journalist and fUrofessor. ; ' ' '
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Support Begun's Russian'Aviv'
Dear Mr. Kaplan:
~Maywe^ddi)ur voice to Canadian B'nai3'rith(/I[i^ in support of former Soviet Prisoner of Conscience Dr. Joseph Begun's new venture, ^viV, a Russian-language magazine aimed at explaining the glory of Jewish life to those still in Russia and newly-arrived in Israel.
Our demand to the Kremlin must be not only "Let my people go!" but "Let my people know!"
GLENNRICHTER
National Coordinator ... • . , , . Student Struggle.forSpvietJewry
High calibre articles lauded
Dear Mr. Kaplan:
Kudos to you and the 7 for continuing to reprint excellent articles which have appeared in other journalistic sources. The respective articles by Alan Dershowitz (JWB Aug. 23) and Emmanuel Winston (JWB Aug. 30) on the irijustices done to Jonathan Pollard were informative exposes of the political deceit surrounding his unfortunate incarceration.
Similarly, articles by Morris Zuckerman's(y>F5 Aug. 16) and Mordechai Nisan's (/W^^ Sept. 6) were lucid and insightful antidotes to the anti-Israel or leftist Jewish apologist positiohsi so prevalent in the press today.
Your commitment to selecting and reprinting articles of such calibre is appreciated.
SUSAN HART
Letters represent writen'opinions, nof The Bulletin. Right of reply rectifies Inaccuracies. Letters must be signed, with day phone contact, and typed or printed, up to250 words. VIEWPOINT exists for longer pieces, up to 750 words.
T.V. would halt anotlier Holocaust, Larry King says
NEW YORK — "Because of television there will never be another Holocaust," TV interviewer Larry King told some 3,000 persons at Sutton Place synagogue, The nationally-syndicated newspaper, radio and T.V. host was the guest of Rabbi Daivid B Kahane's "Jewish Town Hall" series.
"Television, with its watchful eye and itsl global approach will insure that the eventsl that took place in Nazi_Germany could] never occur again/* King said^ adding: "If there had been communications satellitei T.V. in 1939, Ted Koppel would have had Hitler on *Nightline' the day his troops] invaded Poland to ask him 'why?'"
King continued: "Communism is dead' in Europe because ofT.V. Once television gives KING peoplea glimpse of what freedom is like, they'll demand it for themselves and there'll be no stopping them."
Regaling his audience with reminiscences about his boyhood experiences in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, "There were no gangs, no crime, just clubs," the award-winning interviewer said.