Vice President George Bush met with local Jewish leaders in the Village Hall here Tuesday and visited a memorial to Holocaust victims.
He cited his commitment to Israel and assured a crowd of Jewish supporters that “we shall never forget” the horrors of the Nazi rule in Europe.
According to a Bush presidential campaign spokesman, this was the vice president’s first address to a Jewish audience since his Sept. 7 appearance at a B’nai B’rith International convention in Baltimore.
Just a day after that appearance, reports surfaced that several of Bush’s campaign workers had expressed anti-Semitic and Holocaust-revisionist views.
Those workers, including Fred Malek, who compiled a list of Jews in the Labor Department for President Nixon, have been dismissed from the compaign or positions in groups associated with the Republican Party.
A heavy rain here delayed and cut short Bush’s appearance at the Holocaust memorial. But the vice president had time enough to say, “I have the honor of standing with some of the survivors, saying, we shall never forget, we shall keep the strategic relationship (with Israel) strong, we are committed to human rights around the world.”
NO MENTION OF ACLU
Bush did not reiterate his familiar campaign criticism that Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, though there were reports that his rain-shortened speech contained remarks about the civil rights group.
The ACLU defended the right of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie nine years ago, an event that jolted this community, where an estimated 5,000 Holocaust survivors and their relatives live.
Nearly 150 people were reported to have attended Bush’s address at the Skokie Village Hall, where, according to Erna Gans, he spoke again of Israel’s strategic importance to the United States.
Gans, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, is president of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois.
Among those invited to the event were local rabbis, Jewish leaders, Holocaust survivors and such Illinois Republican leaders as Gov. James Thompson and U.S. Reps. Lynn Martin and John Porter.
A spokeswoman from the Holocaust Memorial Foundation, which maintains the monument, noted that the Bush campaign arranged the event and that it was not part of any activities previously planned by the foundation.
Skokie police stepped up their usual surveillance of the Holocaust memorial over the weekend, in anticipation of Bush’s appearance.
Within hours after its dedication last year, vandals defaced the monument with spray-painted Nazi swastikas. Since then, the Village of Skokie has maintained a video camera that monitors the monument around the clock.
Earlier this fall, Kitty Dukakis, the wife of the Democratic presidential nomince, visited the Skokie memorial.
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