Abba Kovner, a writer and poet who was a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, called on the leaders of Israel today to go to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial tomorrow and to fast as a gesture of national mourning over President Reagan’s visit to the Bitburg military cemetery and for what he perceived to be the “mild” Israeli reaction to that visit.
Kovner charged, in a television interview, that the Jewish people did not stand up for their interests in connection with Bitburg. “Do we not have red lines to the spiritual existence of the Jewish people?” he asked.
There are such red lines, Kovner said — the murder of the Jewish people in the Holocaust and the murder of Jewish history at Bitburg today. “More than 40 years ago, my people were led to slaughter. Today their memory was executed,” Kovner said.
Israel’s two Chief Rabbis — Mordechai Eliahu, Sephardic, and Avraham Shapiro, Ashkenazic — sent a cable of protest to President Reagan in Germany. “The blood of our brethren, the Jewish people of Europe, which were annihilated by those murderers, with the purpose of annihilating the entire Jewish people, cries from under the ground,” their message said.
The Executive of the World Jewish Congress presented letters of protest to the U.S. and German Ambassadors in Tel Aviv today.
Yitzhak Koren, chairman of the Israeli Executive of the WJC, and Avi Beker, director general, met with the German envoy, Nils Hansen. They expressed deep concern over the rising wave of anti-Semitic articles in West Germany in the week before Reagan’s visit to Bitburg. Koren expressed concern that the visit would strengthen the trend among the German public to deny the Holocaust.
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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.
