President Zalman Shazer, of Israel, declared in a Rosh Hashanah message today that while the Jewish State was weathering the pangs of its re-birth it was still eluded by solutions to its greatest problems — peace and security.
The Six-Day War ended two-and-a-half years ago, but the aftermath of that struggle is no less trying than the war itself, he said. In the absence of peace, “We must bless those who stand on guard everywhere in the land, who continue to build, to strengthen and create,” he said.
President Shazar observed that, “It should become constantly clearer to our adversaries that what they did not achieve in war cannot be achieved by assaults on a small scale and murder from ambush. In fact, Israel’s economy has expanded and grown stronger while its intellectual and spiritual life has manifestly continued to develop.”
President Shazar had praise for the “sense of unity” among Jews in the free world “which has reasserted itself in concern and action.” He said that while the prospects for peace were no brighter now than at the start of the year, “We must work for peace with no less zeal than we invest in our self-defense and we must continue to hope and to believe that the awful blindness and hardheartedness of the Arab rulers will not endure forever.”
Israel’s Sephardic chief Rabbi, Itzhak Nissim, devoted much of his Rosh Hashanah message to castigating the nations of the world for what he called their “casual attitude” toward Jewish suffering “Persons on innocent voyages are being kidnapped and vicious show-trials are held with innocent victims hung in the streets and Jewish blood is being shed,” he said. “But the world does not regard the saving of our peoples’ remnants as a moral imperative.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
