Eshkol Assails Poland, Soviet Union As Ally of Arab ‘murderers’

Prime Minister Levi Eshkol denounced today the current wave of officially inspired anti-Semitism in Poland and the global policies of Soviet Russia which caused it to identify itself with the Arabs “who want to do to the Israeli Jews what Hitler did to the Jews of Europe.” The Prime Minister spoke at Kibbutz Mordei Hagetaot (Ghetto Fighters) where thousands of Israelis gathered for a mass memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto fighters of 1943 and the six million Jews who perished under Nazi rule.

Mr. Eshkol warned that after 20 years and three wars, Israel faces estrangement, misunderstanding and ill-will. “There are many whose hearts are filled with hatred of our nation,” he said. “And there are those who try to exploit this bestial feeling for internal political purposes.” In the practice of anti-Semitism, he said, “the Polish authorities exceed their teachers — the Russians. How horrible it is that Poland, a country whose earth is saturated with Jewish blood more than any other country, is being swept by this wave. Their rulers are kindling foul anti-Semitic feelings. They persecute the remnants of our brothers who chose to remain in Poland and share its fate. Their only sin is that they are Jews.” Mr. Eshkol assailed the Warsaw regime’s allegation that Polish fighters helped Jews under the Nazis while Jews elsewhere stood idle. “It is a desecration of the memory of six million victims, he declared.

The Israeli leader described Soviet policy in the Middle East as “without morals” and completely lacking in human understanding. “That power today supports war and murder-mongers by every political means. It supplies them with the newest weapons against Israel. At the same time it forcefully imposes isolation on three million Jews within its border whom they deprive of the elementary right to live as Jews.”

Mr. Eshkol stressed that the Jewish nation always had enemies and always overcame them. “This will continue to be so,” he said. “We extracted, almost by force, world agreement to a Jewish State and we witnessed the dream of generations — the ingathering of the exiles. We hope that the day is not far off when the doors will be opened and the others of our brethren will be able to come, who wish to live with us.”

ISRAELIS IN SILENT PRAYER THROUGHOUT NATION FOR MARTYRED JEWISH DEAD

Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest city, came to a complete standstill for two minutes this morning as thousands of citizens bowed their heads in silent prayer in memory of the six million Jews. The demonstration was heralded by the wail of sirens all over Tel Aviv. It brought cars, busses and trucks to a halt and pedestrians to pause on busy street corners. The dirge of the sirens continued for a full two minutes. A moving memorial service was held at noon beside the Treblinka martyrs’ monument in the municipal cemetery. A fire was lit in memory of the Jews who died at that and at other Nazi concentration camps.

Memorial tributes were held in other cities and towns all over Israel yesterday and today for the beleaguered Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. Thousands of Israelis attended mass rallies where the main topic was the new wave of anti-Semitism sweeping Poland today. Mrs. Golda Meir, former foreign minister of Israel and secretary general of the United Labor Party, said at a mass meeting last night that “not even the devil himself would have imagined that today, just two decades after the single largest human tragedy that engulfed the Jewish race, people would stand up in Poland and revive the craze of anti-Semitism.”