The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith today placed before U.S. Attorney General William B. Rogers a record of 45 bombing outrages that have occurred in the South since January, 1957, showing “that the Federal authorities do have jurisdiction in the matter and that Federal action is evidently needed. “Six of the bombings were places of Jewish worship, all occurring during the last six months.
Henry Edward Schultz, national chairman of the ADL, appealed for Federal intervention “to prevent further bombing outrages” in a letter and memorandum to the Attorney General after a meeting with Assistant Attorney General W. Wilson White in connection with the Jacksonville synagogue bombing. Mr. Schultz stressed that although local authorities have basic responsibility for prosecuting the criminals, the situation involves numerous Federal violations and calls for action by the Department of Justice to avoid “loss of life in addition to the considerable losses of property that have been sustained up to this date.”
The operations of the terrorist conspiracy, the ADL pointed out, “have crossed state lines, in itself a Federal violation. In the most recent bombing in Jacksonville, Florida, on April 28, an automobile observed at the scene of the crime bore a Tennessee license plate. In the March 16 Nashville and Miami bombings, the similarity of the dynamiting techniques justify the inference that they stemmed from the same source.”
Mr. Schultz declared that “these bombings in different areas of the South may well involve interstate transportation of explosives in common carriers. If this is so, the United States criminal code was violated. This, too, would seem to call for careful investigation of the entire matter by Federal law enforcement authorities.”
(In Washington, official sources today indicated that the FBI is making available laboratory facilities and offering advice to local authorities in an attempt to apprehend those responsible for synagogue bombings in the South although director J. Edgar Hoover has so far found no basis for Federal jurisdiction.)
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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.
