French President de Gaulle’s attack on the Jews and Israel last week were denounced by the head of the American Jewish Congress as “a relapse into near racism that shames the French ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” but “happily” is not shared by the French people.
Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld, of Cleveland, national president of the AJC, called the French leader’s “attack upon the corporate personality of the Jewish people” a “profound distortion of all history and a tragic insensitivity to what such gross and immoral sentiments have produced in the past. The grandeur and leadership of France will hardly be enhanced by these sad and shabby views” which were “an attempt to justify an untenable and unjust attack upon the State of Israel by an equally untenable and insupportable assault upon an entire people,” Rabbi Lelyveld declared.
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