Schindler in Mosscow: Condemns Soviet Repression of Jews but Warns Against ‘cold-war Warriors’ Who U

A leader of American Reform Jewry strongly condemned Soviet repression of Jews in the USSR here Sunday but warned at the same time that the efforts for peace between the world’s two superpowers, the avoidance of nuclear confrontation, must not be abandoned “in the name of protest.”

Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), addressed a conference of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

He and Father Theodore Hesburgh, former president of Notre Dame University, were invited to participate in the conference by Dr. Bernard Lown of Boston, president of the physicians’ group which won the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize. The theme of the conference is “Religion and Ethics in the Nuclear Age.” Schindler bore down hard on the Soviet Union’s “severe strictures on the right of Jewish emigration” and its “trampling” on the religion and culture of Soviet Jews, “denying them books, the schools, the teachers and the language required for its sustenance.”

But “having protested these and other civil rights injustices, we must not fall into the trap of joining the shrill voices of those who wish to sink the Soviet Union and America into incendiary rhetoric and reciprocal military confrontation.”

PROTEST AND PEACE ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE

Schindler stressed that “protest and peace are not mutually exclusive. If we swallow our protest for the sake of peace — for the sake perhaps of not offending the governments of our East European delegates — then the frail peace will be overturned by the writhings of the injustice itself,” Schindler said.

“But if we abandon the peace in the name of protest — by becoming cold-war warriors and urging an acceleration of the arms race — then the protest corrodes into an immoral threat.”

Schindler was critical of both the U.S. and the USSR. “Each of the superpowers arrogantly considers itself to be Jacob, the one worthy of Isaac’s blessing, the one capable of carrying the values of the present into the future. And each considers the other one to be Esau: the hunter, the predator that would sell his principles for a bowl of porridge.

“The world watches us now as the great powers attempt negotiations, and we pray for their success…yet there can be no genuine end to the obscenity that we know as the arms race–until ‘glasnost’ (openness) becomes a way of life rather than an extraordinary experiment within the Soviet Union; until the policy-makers of the United States realize that the heavens are themselves a canopy of peace over our earth,” an apparent reference to the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) which would deploy nuclear weapons in outer space.

Continuing in the same vein, Schindler said peace remains remote “until the spiritual might rather than the armed might of the Soviet Union is proudly displayed in the May Day parade; until the U.S. government understands that national security cannot be attained by being the first among the countries of the world in arms sales, even while we are only 15th in literacy, 16th in doctor-patient ratio, 18th in life expectancy and 19th in infant mortality.”