Daniel P. Moynihan, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Andrei D. Sakharov, the Soviet physicist and dissident were among five distinguished persons from several countries to receive honorary degrees yesterday from the Hebrew University. Sakharov’s absence provided the theme for Moynihan’s speech which was a denunciation of the Soviet Union, a warning to the free world to oppose aggression and a paean to Israel for its resistance to terrorism.
“Israel has become a metaphor for democracy in the world” and “so equally have the unprincipled attacks by terrorists on Israeli civilians become a metaphor for the general assault on democracy and decency.” Moynihan declared to the audience attending the award ceremonies in the outdoor amphitheater on the Hebrew University’s Mt. Scopus campus.
Referring to Israel’s rescue mission in Uganda, the former UN envoy declared that “The audacity of Israel’s resistance to terrorism has provided us with the most explicit instruction both of the demands made on free men at this time and of the truth that given brave and resolute defenders, free men can and shall prevail.”
In all, 154 doctoral degrees were conferred on university graduates. Recipients of honorary degrees, in addition to Moynihan and Sakharov were Axel Springer, the West German newspaper publisher; Prof. Nathan Feinberg, an Israeli scholar in the field of international law; and Zvi Schwartz, a Jerusalem attorney and community leader.
Sakharov accepted his degree in absentia through his designated representative, Prof. Yuri Mekler of Tel Aviv University. The refusal by Soviet authorities to permit him to attend was cited by Moynihan as a further demonstration of the Soviet leaders’ determination to oppose the freedom of man.
WARNS OF SOVIET DANGER
Moynihan, presently a professor at Harvard University, claimed that the Western world was to blame for failing to discern the true intentions of the Soviet Union. “If the Soviets conclude from our failure to respond to their obvious intent to discredit and dismember the free world that we are certain to be easy, if not, indeed, willing victims, then indeed the democracies are doomed to repeat their experience of 1939 and mislead the aggressors into the apocalypse,” Moynihan warned.
He said there is also the danger that the Soviet leaders would conclude from passivity or silence in face of attacks on Israel that the bulk of the West does not see that “it is the West itself that is truly under attack. Israel has become a metaphor for democracy in the world. And just as Israel has become a metaphor for democracy, so, equally, have the utterly unprincipled attacks by terrorists on Israeli civilians become a metaphor for the general assault on democracy and decency,” Moynihan said.
During the ceremonies the Solomon Bublick Prize was presented to the American women’s Zionist leader, Mrs. Rose L. Halprin, and to Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein of Rochester, N.Y. Levi Gertner, a Jewish educator from Britain, received the Samuel Rothberg Prize for Jewish education. Dr. Lazar Friedland, a recent immigrant from Riga, was awarded the Aharon Katzir Prize for excellence in his Ph.D. work. The late Aharon Katzir, brother of President Ephraim Katzir, was one of the victims of the 1972 Lod Airport massacre.
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.
