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7 COMMERCIAL BROADLOOMS, INC. CALHOUN, GEORGIA 30701 PHONE: (404) 629-4521 Executive Offices A subsidiary of COMMERCIAL CARPET CORPORATION 10 WEST 33RD STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10001 verdict in matters of a person’s status should one of the two Catholics concerned not obey. In other words, believe it or not, Catholics who are Israeli citizens have to behave in their private lives vis-a-vis the law more Catholically than Italians in Italy, the home country of mother church. That does not go for Catho lics alone, but for now twelve recognized creeds in the coun try including, of course, the Jews. This leads to a state of affairs for instance, where the Israeli army has only kosher food; where El Al, our airline has nothing but kosher food for any passengers; when a woman like Golda Meir can be come Prime - Minister of the country, but she will not be ac cepted as a witness in an ordin ary rabbinical case because Talmudic law will not accept a woman as a fully fledged witness but secular foreign service, of course, will. We have, in other words, from the Jewish point of view, a dual system of law and in fact a dual system of Judges. For the personal status system we have rabbis and Dayonim— again for weddings, divorces, adoptions and what have you, and also the worldly secular system of judges you have in the states. Since there are some cases of overlapping, now and then, friction of course is inevi table. But you must not forget that the Bible, which has pinch hit for so many worldly things for such a long time, is only now gradually shrinking back into its primordial dimensions as the basis of religion, rather than substituting as judges, army, government and presi dent, as it had to do for eigh teen centuries. Let me go to the charge of atheism. We have in Israel, pr shall we say we had in Israel in the early years of statehood, when we were three or four years old, something I would call a violent swing away from religion. At times synagogues were empty and rabbis were held up for ridicule by young Jews in the Jewish state. There sprang up such a. thing as a Canaanite movement of sabras in Israel who said they are not even Jews any more nor do they want to be. What they would like to be is Canaanites the pre-Jewish inhabitants of Israel, whose ties of blood unite them with the Arabs and other Semitic peoples, and “to hell with all that baloney about being one Jewish people of five continents with diaspora Jewry included.” It was a time when young Hebrew writers wanted to try the impossible, to debiblicize the Hebrew language, and in stead of writing in biblical con cepts, at least of Israeli life, they figured that Steinbeck and Hemingway would be more to their taste and more to the liking of their pens. Hardly anything could be more unnatural, but perhaps we ought to explain this swing away from religion. The only way we could ex plain it, now that we are get ting out of this phase, is by understanding the dilemma of our teachers. You see, our teachers in Israel have one problem which still is far from solved and that is—how does one teach a young generation of Israelis the Hitler genocide? How does one transform mass murder into a subject of his torical study? It’s alright for professors but how do you do that for teenagers? How do you win CROWN JANYJ0, INC. Tufted Bedspreads & Rugs Calhoun, Ga. Chatsworth, Ga. MAIN OFFICE fIRST NHTIQTNHL MARIETTA, GA. EAST MARIETTA BRANCH W. P. Stephens Lumber Co. The department store of the building industry Austell — Marietta Roswell — Smyrna Cox Printing Company Phone 428-2182 Lithography Commercial Printing MARIETTA, GA. The Valley Times-News West Point, Ga. — Lanett, Ala. The Southern Israelite