Special to the JTA American Indian Leader Appealed to Reagan Not to Go to Bitburg

An American Indian, speaking for a tribe native to New York State, was among the first American non-Jews to appeal to President Reagan to reverse his decision to visit the military cemetery at Bitburg.

Writing to the President on April 30 “as a people seasoned in suffering, ” Chief Irving Powless, Jr., Secretary of the Onondaga Nation, pointed out that “Your visit to a cemetery that has the graves of former SS troops could be perceived to support the cause” of the “fast rising groups in America of neo Nazi and fascist inclined paramilitary organizations espousing the same dogma expressed by the Third Reich.”

In his letter, released to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency today, nearly a week after Reagan placed a wreath at the Bitburg cemetery, Powless urged the President to ponder “the position taken by Rabbi Joseph B. Glaser, executive vice president, Central Conference of American Rabbis in his letter (to Reagan) of March 19, 1985.”

Powless quoted to Reagan parts of Glaser’s letter: “You see, Mr. President, how one sin leads to another. We did our best to ignore the massacre of the Armenians and the obliteration of the Indians, and that helped us to look the other way as the Nazis sought to exterminate the entire Jewish people, and now, the decision that the President of the United States not to visit Dachau is being used to further ‘bury in our conscience’ the massacre of the Indians even though, in the same breath, we admit that ‘we perpetrated (it) ourselves.'”

Powless wrote, in his letter: “The comparison made by Rabbi Glaser is important because it comes from a perspective of a people who were victims of the Holocaust.” He added that Reagan’s later inclusion of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp site on his itinerary “does not justify the visit to the cemetery at Bitburg.” The Indian leade said in his letter that he was writing “without rancor.”Glaser has long been active on behalf of American Indians.