The Simon Wiesenthal Center reacted sharply Wednesday to one person’s announced boycott of the center’s dinner here Monday night, because of the appearance as keynote speaker of West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Los Angeles-based center, accused Menachem Rosensaft of making an “undeserved and unbecoming attack” on Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal.
Rosensaft, founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, called the Kohl invitation tasteless.
He cited, among other things, Kohl’s invitation in 1985 to President Reagan to place a wreath at the German military cemetery in Bitburg, where members of the Waffen SS are buried along with other German soldiers.
Cooper, who said he also spoke for Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Wiesenthal Center, said Rosensaft suffered from “selective amnesia.”
He recalled, in a telephone interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, that shortly after the Bitburg episode, Kohl was a luncheon guest of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
The lunch was attended by leaders of the World Jewish Congress, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, among many others.
Said Cooper, “you don’t place a person in eternal quarantine” for a mistake.
Rosensaft has made “a cynical, undeserved and unbecoming attack on Wiesenthal,” Cooper said.
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