July 13, 2007
Revisit History of Kielce
The Kielce Pogrom of July 4, 1946, was initiated by policemen and soldiers and later joined by civilians, not the other way around (“Preserve Memory of Shoah By Maintaining Memorials,” July 6). The culpable inaction of police and army commanders, notably state security’s Major Wladyslaw Sobczynski, increased the number of casualties.
While the Communist regime wanted to consign the pogrom to oblivion, public silence was broken in December 1981 with an article by Krystyna Kersten in Tygodnik Solidarnosc, the Solidarity Weekly.
After archives became freely accessible in 1989, a wealth of research on the pogrom followed, by scholars such as Bozena Szaynok, whose book on Kielce appeared in 1992. Stanislaw Meducki and Zenon Wrona edited a two-volume collection of documents on the pogrom, published in 1992 and 1994, respectively, with the support of the city of Kielce.
The sculpture dedicated in 2006 was not the first memorial in Kielce. A plaque on the building at 7 Planty Street, the site of the pogrom, was dedicated at a ceremony in 1990 at which Lech Walesa spoke.
At ceremonies in 1996, on the 50th anniversary of the pogrom, then-prime minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz called for “words of truth and moral assessment.” Remarks by Elie Wiesel on the same occasion were criticized not for what he said about the pogrom, but for his reference to the dispute over crosses at Auschwitz-Birkenau, then a contentious issue but since resolved.
Charles Chotkowski
Director of Research, Holocaust Documentation Committee
Polish American Congress
Fairfield, Conn.
Active on Immigration
Historically, few issues have galvanized the Jewish community like the struggle to welcome new immigrants and protect refugees. As an organization that has been energetically working for several years to rally our community in support of comprehensive immigration reform, it was heartening to read the Forward’s strong and clear endorsement of the plan (“Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Illegal,” June 27). We must, however, take exception to the assertion that the Jewish community has been “virtually invisible” in the debate — that is simply not so.
Building on decades of advocacy work in Washington and around the country, in 2006 the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and Jewish Funds for Justice convened the Jewish Task Force for Comprehensive Immigration Reform. The task force is comprised of national Jewish agencies, including the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Council of Public Affairs, as well as local Jewish agencies from across the country.
As part of this task force, Jewish agencies from progressive to mainstream organized advocacy campaigns urging Congress to move swiftly to fix our broken immigration system. Together we developed a “Mitzvah Call-In Campaign,” where the Jewish community was asked to call members of Congress each week and urge them to pass comprehensive immigration reform.
The task force also organized letter-writing campaigns, sending letters from Jewish organizations across the country, including a letter to the House and Senate leadership signed by high-level Jewish leaders from prominent national and local Jewish agencies calling on Congress to move forward with immigration reform. We found great enthusiasm among the sizeable Russian-speaking Jewish refugee community here in New York and around the country, which has written hundreds of letters to legislators.
Additionally, HIAS convenes an interfaith coalition of national organizations committed to comprehensive immigration reform. Within this coalition and other ethnic and immigrant rights organizations, national and local Jewish organizations have played a vital role in advocacy for fair, humane and workable legislation.
Gideon Aronoff
President and CEO
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society
New York, N.Y.
Camps Mix Praying, Fun
Having spent eight years at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires, both as a camper and a counselor, I was very upset by a June 29 article on Jewish summer camps (“As Kids Head to Camp, Parents Ask If They’re Having Enough Fun”).
The Forward assumes that because children learn and pray in the context of school, they cannot enjoy these Jewish activities during the summer. That is not the case. I have observed that for many campers, praying in Camp Ramah is a much more meaningful, fun and enjoyable experience than at home or in school. In addition, the sports program at Camp Ramah is first rate. Campers spend five hours a day swimming and playing sports in state-of-the-art facilities.
Ariel Fisher
New York, N.Y.
Blair Doomed To Fail
Diplomat Daniel Kurtzer is quoted in a July 6 article as saying of Tony Blair, “It is hard to see how he will succeed” as Middle East envoy “unless — and this is the key — Washington ratchets up its own diplomacy and pursues a parallel track of serious diplomacy” (“Europe Turns Toward Mideast With High-Level Appointments”). But this misconstrues the Middle East situation.
The absence of Israeli-Palestinian peace is due not to an absence of American diplomatic effort, but to the absence of a Palestinian willingness to accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.
President Bush’s October 2001 declaration of support for a future Palestinian state — something that President Clinton never publicly offered — not only persuaded the Palestinians and others that the United States was weak and concessionary, but also rewarded Yasser Arafat for resorting to terrorism.
This was one of a number of Americans missteps that has helped ensure that Palestinians do not fulfill their signed commitments under the Oslo agreements to jail and disarm terrorists and end the incitement to hatred and murder in the Palestinian Authority-controlled media, mosques, schools and youth camps.
The Bush administration has not shown indifference toward the non-existent peace process. To the contrary, it has pursued fruitless cease-fires, schedules and plans that ignore the continuation of Palestinian terrorism. Blair’s future efforts to move ahead as though these facts didn’t exist are doomed to failure for similar reasons.
Morton Klein
National President
Zionist Organization of America
New York, N.Y.
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