Six memorial candles symbolic of the six million Jewish martyrs plus a seventh candle in tribute to the Allied forces and partisans were lighted here Friday before a congregation of 2,000 persons at the Shaarei Shomayim synagogue in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut hailed the heroism of the ghetto fighters and denounced Polish allegations that the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto had been passive to the Nazi onslaught.
Consul General Aba Gefen of Israel called the Polish government’s policy of anti-Zionism “the new anti-Semitism.” Lieut.-Governor Earl Rowe of Ontario and Chava Rosenfarb, the poet, a survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Eelsen, also addressed the assembly.
(In Montevideo, more than 2,000 members of the Jewish community attended a Warsaw Ghetto memorial rally and approved a resolution condemning the anti-Semitic campaign in Poland. In Brussels, Aba Kovner, who commanded the ghetto fighters in the Vilna ghetto revolt, warned against the revival of Nazism in the world. Two former Belgian prime ministers, Theo Lefevre and Victor Larock participated in the memorial ceremony along with a number of members of the Belgian Parliament. In Buenos Aires, DAIA, the central representative body of Argentine Jewry, censured a local Jewish leftist group which had invited a Polish Embassy official to attend a Warsaw Ghetto memorial meeting.)
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