Chief Rabbi Moses Rosen of Rumania, one of the participants last week in the conference of 19 Christian and 10 Jewish leaders in Geneva, said today that he considered neo-fascism and anti-Semitism in West Germany “a vital danger for Jews as well as for world peace.”
The Chief Rabbi made his comment in a statement sent from Bucharest to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency here in which he dissociated himself from a contrary evaluation made at the close of the parley by Rabbi Seymour J. Cohen of Chicago, president of the Synagogue Council of America. The five-day meeting, sponsored by the World Council of Churches, was attended by religious leaders from the United States, Europe and Israel. Rabbi Cohen said at the end of the meeting that anti-Semitism was no longer a “grave” problem in Europe.
Rabbi Rosen, who was the only East European representative attending the Geneva sessions, asserted in his statement that the problem of anti-Semitism in West Germany was not discussed “in any form during the conference in which I took part” and that Rabbi Cohen was “not authorized by any one at the conference to declare that anti-Semitism in West Germany is of no importance any more.” Rabbi Cohen had declared that he disagreed with reports of a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe and that such reports stemmed from the fact that occasionally some “idiot” painted an anti-Semitic slogan or desecrated a Jewish cemetery. Rabbi Cohen added a warning, however, that there were some “cesspools” of anti-Semitism “which still have to be sealed off.”
The Chief Rabbi of Rumania declared that “rapprochement between Jews and Christians, which is so much wanted, is possible only by eradication of anti-Semitism, not by minimizing it.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
