Dr. Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, called today for “prompt action” by the United States Senate early in the next session of Congress to ratify the international genocide convention.
Speaking at a conference of Washington leaders of the organization, Dr. Prinz noted that the United States has not acted on ratification since the treaty was unanimously adopted in the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. He said that United States support was “necessary to give strength and significance to the convention as a symbol and a pledge that mass murder of the kind perpetrated by the Nazi regime will never again be permitted by the international community. “
“Our country’s failure thus far to associate itself with the international community in ratifying the Convention–in contrast with the U.S.S.R., which did sign it–has exposed the United States to Communist allegations of insincerity, has embarrassed our friends abroad who look to us for leadership in this area and has reduced the treaty’s force as a guarantee of international action against the crime of genocide” Dr. Prinz said.
He hailed the action of Catholic and Protestant church leaders in seeking to eliminate the religious basis of anti-Semitism. “The recognition by Christian leaders that Christian tradition has its own share of responsibility for anti-Semitism and that the horrors of Nazism as recited in the trial of Eichmann are the culmination of anti-Jewish prejudice, is a turning point in the relationship between the Christian world and the Jewish people, ” he declared.
Dr. Prinz listed three actions by Catholic leaders in the U.S. and abroad which he said were the beginnings of a “profound re-appraisal of Christian teachings in terms of removing the negative stereotype of the Jew. ” They were:
1. Elimination of the phrase “perfidious Jew” from the Catholic liturgy of Good Friday, by decree of Pope John XXIII. Dr, Prinz said this action, which took place in 1958, marked a new approach in revising offending portions of Catholic liturgy.
2. The covering last week–on orders of the Vatican–of medieval anti-Jewish descriptions of pictures of a “ritual murder” in the Catholic church at Deggendorf, Germany, to which thousands of Catholics make pilgrimages annually. Dr. Prinz noted that the Catholic diocese in nearby Regensburg had also confiscated a book published by a Benedictine father in 1960 in which the alleged 14th century ritual murder was presented as fact.
3. The statement adopted last month by the National Conference for Interracial Justice calling on Catholics “to work for the complete removal of anti-Semitic prejudice where it exists in ourselves and our nation. ” Dr. Prinz said the position adopted by the Catholic lay group was “particularly significant” in its recognition that there is a relationship between polite anti-Semitism and the horrors of Nazism.
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