Public figures in Israel today sent new appeals to President Reagan to cancel his Sunday visit to the German war cemetery at Bitburg. At the same time, it was announced here that hundreds of Jewish and non-Jewish Holocaust survivors will demonstrate at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp site when Reagan goes there Sunday.
Their message to him will be that if he goes through with his visit to Bitburg later the same day to honor German war dead who include members of the notorious Waffen SS, he should stay away from Bergen-Belsen.
Plans for the demonstration were confirmed by Kalman Sultanik, vice president of the World Jewish Congress, who was the only member of his family to survive the Nazi death camps.
Leon Dulzin, chairman of the Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization Executives, sent a final appeal to Reagan to cancel his Bitburg visit. He told the President, who arrived in Bonn today, that by stopping at both Bergen-Belsen and Bitburg he would be equating the victims and their murderers.
Two Holocaust survivors, Labor MK Shevah Weiss and Tuvia Friedman, head of the Haifa-based war crimes documentation center, issued similar appeals to Reagan. Weiss observed that the visit to Bitburg would contradict all of the principles the President professes to hold.
Friedman called on West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to resign. He accused the German leader of using Reagan in an attempt to wipe out Germany’s shame over its Nazi past. He said he would demonstrate tomorrow outside the West German Embassy here and urged Jews all over the world to demonstrate outside West German legations in their respective countries.
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