‘A Major Cause for Celebration’: for the First Time Since WWII the Czechoslovak Jewish Community Wil

This summer, for the first time since World War II, the Jewish community in Czechoslovakia is going to have its own rabbi. "This is a major cause for celebration for us," Dr. Desider Galsky, president of the Council of Jewish Communities in Czechoslovakia, told a group of Jewish leaders, members of the World Jewish Congress-American Section, at a meeting here this week.

He said that a young Czechoslovakian Jew will be ordained as a rabbi on June 10 at the Jewish Seminary in Budapest, Hungary. "We are going to open a Talmud Torah and revive Jewish life," Galsky said.

There were about 350,000 Jews in Czechoslovakia before the war, he pointed out. As a result of the Holocaust there are less than 20,000 today, mostly elderly Jews who survived the Holocaust.

NEED RELIEF FROM FEELING OF ISOLATION

According to Galsky, most of the Jews in Czechoslovakia today lead "good, comfortable lives." He said that what they need most of all is to be relieved of the feeling of isolation from other Jewish communities in the world. "We are not poor, helpless Jews, " he said. "For us, the most important thing is to know that we are not isolated."

He welcomed visits by American Jewish individuals and groups to Czechoslovakia. He said that the Jewish community in Czechoslovakia also has contacts with Israel despite the absence of diplomatic relations, since the Six-Day War, between Jerusalem and Prague. "We receive information and newspapers from Israel," Galsky said.

He stated that Jews in Czechoslovakia "are not discriminated against any more than any other minority group in the country." He said that the problem of anti-Semitism is marginal. "But if there is any anti-Semitic attack against us, we respond to it firmly."

Galsky said that not long ago a vicious anti-Semitic article appeared in the weekly, Tribuna, accusing the "Zionists" of being responsible for the deaths of Jews in the Holocaust. "We sharply protested to the editor of the paper and demanded a retraction," he said, adding that indeed recently, in the same column in the paper, there were a few articles favorable to the Jews.

Galsky said, in response to a question, that the Jews, as any other citizen in Czechoslovakia, are not allowed to emigrate. He noted, however, that two months ago a Jew was allowed to leave for Israel after seeking an exit visa for more than five years. "This is the one and only dissident we had," he said. Galsky and Arthur Radvansky, the secretary-general of the organized Jewish community in Czechoslovakia, were in the United States as representatives of the Czechoslovakian government for the opening in the U.S. of the "Precious Legacy" exhibition of Judaica and Jewish life from the State Museum in Prague. The meeting with the World Jewish Congress leaders took place at the Park East Synagogue, whose spiritual leader is Rabbi Arthur Schneier, chairman of the WJC-American Section.