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| [ The §«ithera Israelite ]
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A fable for Yom Kippur
Growing old
f Wordsworth put it well when he said, “The child is father of
!• the man.” We all travel the path from childhood to old age,
i the one experience we share in common. And yet, because the
S mind does not really want to contemplate mortality, we give
predouslittie thought to the problems at the aged. We simply
3 do not want to think about ft
In this issue of our paper we explore the difficulty of grow
ing old in Miami Beach (page 9) and we also profile a
remarkable woman who has managed to survive 100 years
and is doing well at the Jewish Home (page 6).
It is obvious that the variety of problems created by old age
require careful planning. What is most needed, we think, is an
alternative choice between the institutionalised home and the
sometime unwanted pigeon-holing in the home of a child.
Several communities have begun to experiment with “com
munal” homes for the aged, a concept that allows the elderly,
who are able, to live together as a group with minimal super
vision. This permits a retention of dignity and a degree of in
dependence at a considerble savings.
This seems an intelligent approach and we would like to see
the idea explored in our community.
Can we forget?
It was five years ago that 11 Israeli athletes were murdered
in Munich by the Black September arm of the group calling
itself the Al-Fatah. ' t
In light of recent attempts to force acceptance of the PLO
on Israel, it might be well to remember who the murderers
are.
Al-Fatah was founded in 1967 under Egyptian sponsorship
and made its first raid into Israel in 1964. Egypt, Algeria,
Libya and Syria provide it with arms, funds and training
bases, with additional financial support coming from Saudi
Arabia and other Arab states. The organization now has a
considerable number of bases in Lebanon.
At first Al-Fatah concentrated on border raids and
propaganda, but through its Black September arm it moved
into international terrorism, carrying out, among other
atrocities, the assassination of Jordanian Prime Minister Tal
in 1971, the murder of the Israeli athletes, and the brutal
murder of the U.S. Ambassador in Khartoum in 1978.
The leader of this group of hoodlums is none other than
Yassir Arafat, who is also the head of the PLO. Get the pic
ture?
In March of this year, Arafat reiterated that his accepted
principles were a continuation of theta* of force, no peace
and no recognition cfleraeL In fact, a terrorist captured in
Northern Israel in May of this year en route to attack a movie
theater and murder the audience, said that he and four com
panions had been briefed in Beirut by Arafat personally three
days before the “mission.”
This is the man and the organisation that Israel is being
pressured to meet in Geneva. Many more atrocities have been
committed under the baoper of Arafat and the PLO but space
does not permit us to list them all.
Can we forget the memory of ll young men who were
murdered in cold blood at Munich?
What would you say if you were Menachem Begin?
At we toy on Yom Kippur, the lord decide* who
will rid* on horseback and who will crawl am foot
T%e main thing it — hope! A Jew mutt always
hope, mutt never lot* hope. And t» the meantime,
what if we watte away to a thadowf For that we
are Jewt — the Choten People, the envy and ad
miration of the World
Sholom Aleichem’s Tsvye
■Ones upon a time it was Yom Kippur and Jews
all over the world went to synagogues and listened
to rabbis tell them what they had
done wrong during the year. They
also recited peyynte* (poems) that
were in the prayer books and
stood up when the ark was open
ed. Many of them fasted and
many of them ate lunch late as a
*ig® of deprivation.
They felt they had done their
part They had attended syna-
gogae with their families, had worn their best new
clothes and had seat their friends.
But on this particular Yom Kippur, something
was different. Even though pessimism and
cynicism were still rampant throughout the land,
the newspapers that evening were full of stories
about odd miracles. Things were happening that
no one thought possible.
When the Jews returned to their homes from the
synagogues, they read in their paper* 1 that:
— Someone stood up in the UN and told the
Arabs to take their oil and get lost
— Cities in the North finally followed the lead
of the South and were integrating their schools.
Chicago, Boston and other such northern cities had
long pointed an accusing finger at the South as be
ing racist but somehow had neglected to look un
der their own noses for the worst kind of prejudice.
The South watched as mothers threw rocks at
policemen on television and forgave the North for
their past hypocrisies. ,
— Henry Kissinger and Michael Blumenthal
admitted that they were Jewish.
— President Jimmy Carter made two con
secutive statements about the Mideast that were
not contradictory. But then he made a third state
ment and - alas! — he had changed his mind
again.
— The large oil companies admitted their
profits were excessive, agreed to discontinue their
strategy of calculated hysteria and dropped the
price of gasoline to a reasonable level.
— A pound of uranium was missing and Israel
was not accused of having it
— The French government said to its coun
trymen, “We’d rather walk than give in to the
Arabs” and sold brae! 27 Mirage jets.
— The U.S. stopped worrying about giving the
Panama Canal away and remembered that Israel
did not even have the right to use the granddaddy
of all canals — the Sues.
— The PLO decided to set up a Palestinian
homeland in Saudi Arabia because they finally
realised that's where the oil is.
_ The Knesset met in Israel and agreed to
eliminate red-tape in everyday Israeli Ufa.
— Mi Amin was nominated for the Nobel Peace
prise but gave himself away by promptly shooting
the courier who brought him the news from
Sweden.
— Russia discarded its national paranoia and
decided the country was mature enough to allow
anyone who wanted to leave to do so.
There were many ouch unlikely events on that
night of Yom Kippur and Jews all over this world
were stunned. They asked themselves: How could
this happen?
And then they remembered what they had read
in their prayer books that day. They remembered
about atonement, forgiveness, hope, the good life
and, above all, miraclet.
And they also remembered what they should
never have forgotten: that anything is possible
with the Chosen People.
Unlikely, you say. I swear by Joseph’s multi
colored Coat that it could happen.
'Quota" applied
Reverse discrimination fought
by Joseph Pdekott
The American Jewish Com
mittee and the American Jewish
Congress, together with six
ethnic groups have joined ip a
Friend of the Court brief to the
U.S. Supreme Court jn a major
teat eaae on the issues* whether
race may be conaidered to un
iversity admiaaion procedure*.
The brief supports affirmative
action to speed the entry of
racial minoritiee into higher
education but oppoaea the use of
racial quotas, a statement isaued
outhebrief by the AJCommittee
and the AJCongraee aaya. The
tribunal is to hear arguments in
the case of Allan Bakke against
the Regents of the University of
California at its October term. A
decision may not bo handed
down for several months after
that
Bakke, a white 96-year-oM
civil engineer from San Fran-
deco, had applied for admiaaion
to the medical school on the
Davii campus of the University
of California in 1978 and again
to 1974. Both times his applica
tion was rejected, although in
those same years the university
had accepted “minority group 1 *
students who were lew qualified
than Bakke under a spec id
program that applied separate
standards of admission to them.
The university's special ad
missions program allotted. 16 out
of 100 places on the basis of rake.
Last September, by * six to one
decision written by Justice
Stanley Moek, the California
Supreme Court ruled the univer
sity’s special admissions
program for “minorities” Was
unconstitutional.
This is the first case before the
U.S. Supreme Court on so-called
“reverse discrimination” since
1974 when s special admissions
program at the University of
Washington Law School came
before it. Marco Defunis Jr., a
white applicant who happened to and psychologically unsound,
b# Jewish, was denied admis- legally sad constitutionally
skm. He charged, as Bakke dom
to this case, that the program
violated his rights under the
14th amendment The trial court
The uw of racial quotas w ad
vocated by the University of
California “would sacrifice the
bask principles of racial equali
ty for expediency and short-term
advantage,” the brief said, the
philosophy of racial quotas was,
it said, “factually, educationally
erroneous and profoundly
damaging to the fabric of
American society.”
The organisations, while rqjec-
"... we believe that disadvantaged students can
be aided by other procedures . . .
ruled to his favor to Washington
but its decision was reversed by
the Washington State Supreme
state interest” in integration rf
the school and the profession. By
a five to four decision, the U.S.
Supreme Court declared the case
“moot" because Defunis had
later been admitted to the law
achool and was about to
graduate when the issue reached
the U.S. Supreme Court
“We submit thnr brief," the
eight organisations Said,
“because we believe that our
intern of constitutional her
oes would be gravely tu«ier-
mined if the law ware to give
sanction to the use of race in the
decision-making procure of
governmental agencies and
because we believe that disad
vantaged students can be aided
by other procedures that are
both constitutional and prac-
ting the criterion of race and the
use of racial quotas, stressed the
need for intensified efforts to
recruit disadvantaged students
and to help them “in overcoming
cultural or economic handicaps,
thereby expanding the
educational opportunities of our
nation’s historically deprived
minorities, among others,” but
such assistance ahould be
granted on the basis of in
dividual disadvantage, not race,
the organisations said.
The Anti-Defamation League
of B’nai B’rith also submitted to
the U.S. Supreme Cpurta Friend
of the Court brief in the Bakke
case. Listed as supporters of the
ADL brief were UNICO, the
National Jewish Labor Com
mittee; the National Jewish
Commission on Law and Public
Affairs, and the Council of
Supervisors and Administrators
of New York City, AFSA, AFL-
CIO, a labor group in the city’s
school system.