A former leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising is among the thousands of Solidarity officials arrested by the Polish authorities since martial law was declared in Poland a week ago, it was reported from Warsaw today. He was identified as Marek Edelman who was deputy commander of the Jewish battle against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. Edelman, who lives in Lodz, had eluded arrest during World War II.
Another report from Warsaw today quoted an article in the official government newspaper Trybuna Ludu attacking two prominent Solidarity advisers, Bronislaw Geremek and Adam Michnik, for their “Zionist sympathies.”
Meanwhile, the American Jewish Committee urged the Polish government to dissociate itself publicly from lengthy anti-Semitic programs presented Dec. 15 on Warsaw TV and radio. The broadcast of an hour-long interview with a Professor Kossecki, taped by Poles in Paris, included charges that Jewish groups had managed to take control of 80 percent of Polish industry and to put the Catholic church and liberal Communist leaders on the wrong road.
Another change by Kossecki, according to the AJCommittee representative in Paris, Nives Fox, was that the Jews and Free Masons were responsible for the Solidarity movement’s extreme wing and that the Masons of Poland had for several years been in close contact with a Masonic Copernic Lodge in France. Fox noted that there is no such lodge in France.
According to the AJCommittee, insofar as one can tell from reports trickling out of Poland, the 6,000-member Jewish community has not been affected in any special way during the crisis, nor, until the Dec. 15 broadcasts, were Jews singled out.
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.
