San Francisco Group to Combat Nazism

Mayor George Moscone of San Francisco is heading up a citywide committee of community and religious leaders to provide continuing education against Nazism in the schools there.

Earl Raab, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council in San Francisco, in a telephone conversation with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said the committee is a direct answer to the opening of a Nazi bookstore across from a synagogue in a residential district at the southwest edge of San Francisco. He said up to now the efforts to provide education about Nazism had been mainly an effort of the Jewish community.

Raab said the bookstore today was boarded up following the damage inflicted last Friday night when a group of more than 50 angry Jews wrecked the store. The owner of the building. Nathan Green, an Auschwitz survivor who rented the store not knowing it was to Nazis, is in the process of having the group evicted. They have until April 15 to vacate the place.

Following the wrecking of the Rudolf Hess Bookstore, rocks were thrown at Temple B’nai Emunah across the street, smashing five stained-glass windows. Two persons were arrested in connection with the wrecking of the bookstore, Morris Weiss, a 55-year-old Auschwitz survivor and his son, Allen, 24, and charged with malicious mischief and assault.

Raab noted that most of the Jews who wrecked the bookstore, swinging tire irons and axes, were Holocaust survivors or relatives of survivors. Many of the members of the synagogue are also Holocaust survivors.

Rabbi Brian Lurie, executive director of the Jewish Welfare Fund of San Francisco, said the Jewish community felt it was “grotesque” that the Nazis would have opened a store with a swastika on the window in front of a synagogue which includes in its congregation many members who had come through the horrors of the Holocaust.

Raab said that the Nazis in San Francisco have only 10-20 members and usually have to bring in members from outside when they plan a major demonstration. He said most of their efforts are aimed against Blacks. He said the Nazis’ last major public confrontation was about two years ago at the Board of Education when they protested busing to integrate schools in San Francisco.