Black African Diplomat Says There is a ‘crisis of Misunderstanding’ Between Jewish People and Third

There is a “crisis of misunderstanding” between the Jewish people and its aspirations and the Third World, Ambassador James Jonah of Sierra Leone told delegates attending the World Jewish Congress Governing Board here.

Jonah, Assistant United Nations Secretary General and Secretary General of the Second World Conference to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination, described in considerable detail his efforts at explaining to other Africans the concept of Zionism as intrinsically anti-racist and anti-ghetto, in the context of the successful efforts to head off the inclusion of the Zionism-equals-racism equation in the final declaration of the Second World Conference on Racism, held in Geneva in 1983.

While this formula was not included, several paragraphs condemning Israel’s “racial discrimination against Palestinians” in the occupied territories, and the increased relations with the “racist regime” of South Africa were included.

POINTS TO A KEY FACTOR

Jonah pointed to the “high profile” of Israel’s relations with South Africa as a key factor in the Black African nations’ refraining from diplomatic relations with Israel. “Your agony in thinking about the Holocaust is exactly the African feeling about apartheid,” Jonah said. “Your experience in the Holocaust frightens the Africans.”

Responding to Jonah, Dr. Gerhart Riegner, former Secretary General of the WJC and now co-chairman of its Governing Board, said that it is “our duty to come back to the UN Decade (Against Racism) on all fronts.” (The WJC had withdrawn from the First Decade Against Racism 1973-1983 after the UN General Assembly adopted the Zionism-equals-racism resolution in 1975.)

Paraphrasing Chaim Weizmann’s 1939 statement about fighting both the Nazis and the British White Paper, Riegner added: “We will fight against racism as if the anti-Israel clauses (in the final declaration of the Second World Conference on Racism) did not exist. We will fight the anti-Israel discriminatory clauses as if the fight against racism didn’t exist.”

‘NO SELECTIVE STRUGGLE AGAINST RACISM’

Rabbi Arthur Schneier, chairman of the WJC Third World Commission, spoke of how the Holocaust began with racism. Jews, he said, were the first historical victims of racism “and we are its victims still in many parts of the world. This is why as a matter of survival we identify with the struggle waged by other victims of racism.”

In a strong statement, Schneier said: “There cannot be a policy of differentiation in the struggle against racism. One cannot condemn apartheid and condone anti-Semitism. One cannot condemn anti-Semitism and condone apartheid. There must be no selective struggle against racism.”

CITES CHANGES IN ACTIVITIES FOR SOVIET JEWRY

On a parallel track, Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, declared that the oppression of Soviet Jewry cannot be considered a “strictly internal affair, not any more than we can consider South Africa’s apartheid laws to be strictly an internal affair.”

Speaking of the dangers in activities for Soviet Jewry becoming “cold warriors and urging an acceleration of the arms race,” Schindler said that “we reject the damning caricature of the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’ totally devoid of all humanity,” a reference to this description by President Reagan.

While expressing criticism of the Soviet Union for not living up to its ideals, Schindler was against Jews falling into the trap of “joining the shrill voices of those who wish to sink Russia and America ever more deeply into incendiary rhetoric and reciprocal military confrontation. “He said this would be totally counterproductive to the cause of increasing Soviet Jewish emigration, which diminishes “when Soviet-American relations are strained.”

NON-JEWS LAUDED FOR AIDING ETHIOPIAN JEWS

In a closed session, Ambassador Moshe Gilboa, director of the world Jewish affairs division of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, reportedly lauded non-Jews who had helped Ethiopian Jews, as latter-day Wallenbergs, who could not be mentioned by name. (The reference was to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat, who was instrumental in saving tens of thousands of Jews in Hungary during the Holocaust and who disappeared in the Soviet Union 40 years ago last week.)

The Ethiopian story, Gilboa reportedly said, has “brought to the world a new feeling of Israeli daring and courage” not seen since the days of the Entebbe rescue in 1976 and the capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960. The majority of the African press has been full of “praise, understanding and expressions of solidarity,” Gilboa said.

Franz Cardinal Koenig, the Primate of Austria, who addressed a session on Christian-Jewish relations, announced the contribution of 100,000 Schillings ($5,000) for Ethiopian Jewry relief.

Premier Shimon Peres of Israel said, from Jerusalem, during a closed-circuit TV dialogue between himself and the WJC Governing Board delegates, that a key issue Israel will be focusing on in the near future will be the absorption of Ethiopian Jews. He pointed with pride to the fact that the Ethiopian Jews, “a forlom tribe, divorced and isolated from the mainstream of Jewish history for 2,000 years and under extremely heavy oppression,” had remained Jews.

PERES: WHO IS A JEW QUESTION IS A ‘FUTILE EFFORT’

On another matter, Peres called the Who is a Jew question a “futile effort” and an “unnecessary question. “He expressed gratification that the Knesset “had the wisdom and responsibility not to choose the kind of answer that would divide our people.” The Knesset, on January 16, voted 62-51 against an amendment to the Law of Return demanded by Israel’s Orthodox religious establishment.

In answer to a question on the subject, Peres suggested a “summit meeting” of the major streams in Jewish life “to work out a formula of spiritual coexistence.” In his opening statement on this issue, the Premier emphasized the importance of accepting the concept of pluralism in Jewish life. “We can argue, debate, suggest, and we can remain together,” he said. “We can be different in our views, but united in our destiny.”

Immediately following the conversation with Peres, Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, president of Bar Ilan University and an Orthodox spokesperson, rose and commented that “not all Orthodox Jews support a change in the Law of Return.” Rackman, a former president of the Rabbinical Council of America, said that many of the groups of “modern Orthodox” with which he identifies “strongly oppose changing the law and are perfectly content with the Law of Return as it stands today.”

The session with Peres was scheduled to be followed by a Holocaust memorial service at the Stadttemple (Seitenstettengasse Shul), and two receptions, one of them tendered by Vice Chancellor Norbert Steger of the Freedom Party, to which Defense Minister Friedhelm Frischenschlager also belongs.

That reception was being boycotted by the Austrian Jewish delegation to the WJC Governing Board as well as by some other delegates, including WJC vice president Kalman Sultanik, in protest against the Defense Minister’s greeting of Nazi war criminal Walter Reder.