The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has asked the Polish government to release an historian on the staff of the Catholic University of Lublin who is being held without charges by martial law authorities.
Rabbi Ronald Sobel, chairman of the ADL’s national program committee and senior rabbi of New York’s Temple Emanu-El, said the imprisonment of Prof. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski violates basic civil and human rights. In a letter to Zdzislaw Ludwiczak, Charge d’Affaires of the Polish Embassy in Washington, Sobel added:
“We are asking you and through you the Polish government for the immediate release of Dr. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski and his freedom to chose a place to live and work. Our request is shared by millions of American Jews and Catholics concerned over his future. We look forward to immediate and positive action regarding his case.”
Sobel observed in his letter that Bartoszewski participated in the war against the Nazi invaders and Nazism, before and during World War II. He assisted the Jewish community in Warsaw in the ghetto uprising and afterwards. He was the co-founder and leader of the Council for Aid to Jews from 1942 to 1944 and in his work and declarations stressed the urgent need for a closer Polish-Jewish relationship as the foundation of the moral reconstruction of Poland.
Continuing, Sobel wrote: “As professor of Polish history at the Catholic University of Lublin he shared his vast knowledge and his belief in the importance of a new Catholic-Jewish relationship as an example of Polish responsibility and commitment. His book, “The Samaritans: Heroes of the Holocaust” … expressed the hope for a renewed dialogue between the two communities. In 1963 the Israeli government presented him with the ‘Righteous Among Nations’ award and decorated him again in 1966.”
LONDON (JTA)–The Jon Roseman Television Company here is planning a TV documentary on the history of Yiddish cinema.
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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.
