More than 400 delegates from about 65 countries are arriving here this weekend to attend the 10-day World Jewish Congress Plenary Assembly which begins Sunday evening. The United States delegation is composed of 80 members coming from 14 cities. Major problems concerning Jewish life today will be discussed as well as major world issues.
The keynote address dealing with “The Jewish People in the 20th Century” will be delivered Sunday evening by Dr. Nahum Goldmann, WJC president. Other speakers at the opening evening will be Israel’s Foreign Minister Abba Eban and Deputy Prime Minister of Belgium, M. Willy de Clercq. One of the speakers at the Assembly will be Dr. Eugen Gerstenmaier, president of the West German Parliament. He will participate in a symposium on “Germans and Jews.” Explaining the purpose of this symposium, Dr. Goldmann said in a statement:
“This symposium has caused some doubts and many misunderstandings. The leadership of the World Jewish Congress regards the open and frank discussion of this difficult and delicate problem as necessary, just because the problem is far from being solved, despite the indemnification payments and the normalization of relations between Israel and the German Federal Republic.
“After what happened in the Hitler period, it is obvious that it will take quite some time until German-Jewish relations will be psychologically and spiritually normalized, and recent symptoms of a new anti-Semitically colored nationalism in Germany have given cause to worries and fears. On the other hand, to ignore this problem and not to take note of Germany’s growing importance is a most unrealistic attitude, based on pure emotionalism.
“The purpose of the discussion in Brussels, in which prominent German and Jewish leaders will participate, is to analyze the complexity and the difficulties of the problem, and to make the German people aware that merely material restitution cannot solve the question, and that they must continue to make serious efforts to avoid any resurgence of neo-Nazi or anti-Semitic tendencies and to eradicate old traditions of racial discrimination and anti-Jewish prejudices.
“The frank discussion of the problem by eminent Jewish and German personalities will indicate the importance of this question which will, for quite some time, remain on the agenda of the Jewish and the German peoples and may contribute to its clarification and to a gradual constructive solution,” Dr. Goldmann stressed. Participants in the German symposium will be, in addition to Dr. Gerstenmaier, also Professor Golo Mann, Kilchberg-Zurich; Professor Salo Baron, New York; and Professor Gershon Sholem of Jerusalem.
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