Six editors of Anglo-Jewish newspapers are among 96 American journalists touring the Middle East as part of the first Editorial Conference on the Mideast. They have been meeting with officials and others in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria and are scheduled to go to Jordan and then arrive in Israel Thursday.
But one of the editors, Sam S. Clevenson of the Albany (NY) Jewish World in a dispatch phoned to his newspaper from Cairo, said that a Shavuot visit to the 90-year-old Ismalia Synagogue there “seemed to be a propaganda success” for the Egyptians. In the article which appeared in the May 30 edition of the Jewish World Clevenson said he was almost sorry that he had suggested that the synagogue be visited. He said the visit bore out on the surface the assertion by the Egyptians that there is religious freedom in that country.
But Clevenson noted that “Many of the dozen men and women in the synagogue had been told to attend, they told this reporter. Thus it became an unusually large number of Jewish people in one place.” He added that at the end of the synagogue service a glass window was broken when someone threw an old battery through it.
Clevenson said that at supervised prayer interviews the journalists were told that the 400-500 Jews still in Cairo “are living well with their neighbors, or vice versa.”
VISIT REFUGEE CAMP
In an article, Robert A. Cohn president of the American Jewish Press Association under whose auspices the Jewish editors participated in the tour, reported that 18 of the journalists visited the Ain Flwi Refugee Camp in Lebanon, the scene of retaliation strikes by Israel after the Maalot massacre. They were escorted through the camp by representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and then taken to a meeting of PLO representatives in Beirut.
Cohn also wrote that “Journalists were shocked to see the squalid refugee camps in the midst of the beautiful and prosperous city of Beirut.” He noted that some of the worst camps were directly across from the Kuwait Embassy and the offices of international banking companies.
In addition to Cohn and Clevenson, the Jewish editors are Joseph Samuels, Houston Jewish Herald Voice; Anne Shapiro, Kansas City Jewish Chronicle; Bernice Scharlack, Oakland, Calif., Jewish Observer, and William Pages of the Newark Jewish News.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
