Non-jewish Czechoslovakian Youths Demonstrate for Recognition of Israel

Non-Jewish Czech youths staged a pro-Israel demonstration in downtown Prague Friday without official interference, it was reported here today. The youngsters urged passersby to sign petitions demanding the resumption of diplomatic relations with Israel. Many people signed and there was no intervention by police, according to the report.

(In Tel Aviv, the Czech writer Ladislav Mnacko predicted that it would be a matter of only a few months until the new regime in Prague moved to renew diplomatic relations with Israel which were severed in the aftermath of last June’s Arab-Israel war. Mr. Mnacko came to Israel last year in self-imposed exile because of his Government’s hostile attitude toward Israel. After the liberalization in Czechoslovakia he went back to Prague but returned here last week on a visit. Mr. Mnacko said that the new regime has much to do and its relations with Israel have not been given first priority.)

A three-year diary of events in the Jewish ghetto of Olomuntz in Moravia during World War II will be published in Prague shortly in the original Hebrew in which it was written and in Czech translation. The diary, consisting of three pocket-size books filled with entries in a tiny Hebrew script, was discovered by workers rebuilding a house on the site of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. It was packed in a leather case and was in good condition when curators at the Jewish Museum here deciphered the writing and identified the diary as the property of Egon Redlif of Olomuntz.

It was also reported here that a document was discovered in the Czech national archives that revealed the existence in 1942 of Jewish resistance groups in Czechoslovakia which sabotaged German war-production plants. Every member of the group was caught in an act of sabotage and was executed by the Gestapo, according to the document.