First Time in U.S. Exhibit Commemorating 30th Anniversary of Jewish Resistance Movement Opened by B’

Before a distinguished audience that included West German Ambassador Rolf Pauls, B’nai B’rith today opened a photographic exhibit “The Holocaust and Resistance” commemorating the 30th anniversary of the start of Jewish resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The month-long showing, the first in the United States, consists of captured Nazi photographs of the ghettos, concentration camps and crematoria, and of the organized armed Jewish resistance that started in 1942 and culminated in the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in April of the following year. The exhibit was prepared by Yad Vashem, the national Israeli remembrance authority, in cooperation with the American Federation of Jewish Fighters, Camp Inmates and Nazi Victims.

“The murder of the six million and the struggle of the Jewish people to resist genocide has meaning for all humanity,” David M. Blumberg, B’nai B’rith president, said at the opening in the B’nai B’rith Building’s Klutznick Exhibit Hall. “Jewish communities throughout the world,” Blumberg said, “will commemorate the anniversary with “programs of universal significance.”

Elie Wiesel told the audience: “The Holocaust killed more than its victims. The Jews were not alone in Auschwitz. Mankind was killing itself there.” Speaking to newsmen afterwards, Wiesel said: “If world Jewry reacted towards Jews in Europe in the 1930s like it is towards Soviet Jews now, there would have been no Holocaust.” Regarding the head tax on educated Soviet emigrants, Wiesel said that “If the Russian Jews say ‘pay,’ we should do it, but only they can say.”

Among those present were Assistant Secretary of State Joseph J. Sisco, Deputy Assistant Secretary Alfred L. Atherton, Assistant Secretary for Europe Walter Stoessel, Deputy Assistant Richard T. Davies, Belgian Ambassador Walter Loridan, other diplomatic notables, members of Congress and representatives of the Council of Churches and the Catholic Archdiocese.