A vigil for peace will be conducted Saturday evening at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine led by a group of rabbis and clergymen. The vigil will coincide with the inaugural ball in Washington for President Nixon. Rabbi Robert J. Marx, director of the New York Federation of Reform Synagogues who will be one of the participants, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency today that the purpose of the vigil is “to express the contrast between the dancing in Washington and the continued killing in Vietnam. The vigil is an expression of our anguish that in the midst of the most immoral and barbaric time in our history, people will be dancing instead of trying to bring the agony to an end.”
Rabbi Marx said that other rabbis participating in the vigil include Rabbi Robert Lehman, president of the Association of Reform Rabbis, and Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, director of the interreligious affairs department of the American Jewish Committee. Groups sponsoring the vigil include the Association of Reform Rabbis of New York and vicinity, the Interreligious Coalition of New York, and Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam.
Rabbi Marx also said that he has been invited as the first rabbi to preach a sermon at the regular Sunday services at The Cathedral of St. John The Divine. The invitation, he said, was extended by Bishop Paul Moore. His topic will be “Inauguration and Terrorism.”
SDS RECALLS VICTIMS OF NAZISM
In preparations for a national mobilization in Washington Saturday to protest the war in Vietnam and racism in the United States, the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society issued a flyer stating that the government supports “genocide at home” against the Black people in a fashion similar to that used by Hitler against the Jews. The leaflet notes, in part:
“The Nazis began with verbal diatribes against Jews in the name of ‘purifying-the race.’ The attacks intensified when Jews were deprived of elementary rights and culminated in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, and the Warsaw Ghetto. But the attacks against the Jews were not confined to the Jews.” By the time Hitler fell, the leaflet continues, close to 50 million people were slaughtered in the carnage.
An Israeli Army vehicle escorting road workers was fired on this morning in a bazooka ambush near DJabel Rouse on the Lebanese border. No casualties were reported. The incident was the first in three months on the Lebanese line. The workers were public works employes assigned to clear ice and snow from roads in the area.
Unidentified participants in a recent anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Amsterdam changed the street sign in front of the local Sephardic synagogue, from Lodewijk Visser to Ho Chi Minh Square. Visser, former Jewish president of the Netherlands Supreme Court, was removed from his post by the Nazis on Nov. 19, 1940.
Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Abba Eban is due in Belgium shortly to sign a new Common Market protocol.
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.
