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News Briefs
Sinai families to receive $$$
JERUSALEM (JTA)—The Knesset Finance Committee last
Sunday approved an initial sum of IL 50 million in compensation
to Israeli families who have already left Sinai in the evacuation
required by the terms of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. The total
cost of evacuating 1,500 families from Yamit, Ophira and the
various agricultural settlements during the next two and one-half
years is estimated at IL 4 billion. Committee members were told
that each family will receive IL 2-3 million. The amount of
compensation is based on three criteria: length of residency, size of
family and size of their housing.
Latin Jews slam pro-PLO Latins
BUENOS AIRES (JTA)—The proposal of several Latin
American countries to recognize the Palestine Liberation
Organization was condemned by Gregorio Faigon, president of the
Latin American Jewish Congress. Faigon deplored the fact that
some of those countries “had ceded to external pressure because
certain factors appeared on the surface to be favorable to their
interests." .
Youths protest student transfer
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Eighteen high school youths from Bir
Zeit were detained for questioning last Sunday after Israeli forces
broke up a demonstration in that West Bank college town. The
youngsters set up roadblocks and stoned Israeli military and police
vehicles to protest the forced transfer of other local students to
different schools. The Military Government confirmed that a
number of students were transferred for allegedly inciting disorder.
Pope greets Evron warmly
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Pope John Paul II warmly greeted
Israel's Ambassador to the U.S., Ephraim Evron, at a reception for ;
the Washington diplomatic corps held at the residence of the |S
Apostolic Delegate in the U.S., Jean Jadot, here last Saturday jl
night. Evron was one of the few among approximately 120 chiefs of ^
missions of countries represented in Washington with whom the I*
Pontiff stopped to chat on the receiving line.
As they shook hands in the conventional manner, the Pope ‘
grasped Evron's hand in both of his and told the Israeli envoy J§
about his warm feelings “for your people," it was reported later by
sources present at the reception.
Neo-Nazi’s fine goes to Israel
BONN (JTA)—A 34-year-old man, Peter Ecke, who
distributed neo-jNazi propaganda and attempted to revive the
banned Nazi Party was ordered by a West Berlin court last week to
pay $175 to an atonement fund that sends money to Israel. The
court also ordered Ecke, to be jailed for six and one-half months
and fined Wedo Baumgart, 71, $470 for similar offenses. Ten
others involved in efforts to revive the Nazi Party were jailed for
threes last August in a separate trial.
High Holy Day prices higher
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Prices for High Holy Day articles and
synagogue seats reached new peaks this year. Some of the prices
were reportedly 100 to 300 percent higher than last year. A reserved
seat in one of Jerusalem's central synagogues was sold for up to IL
1.000 ($33). although it was still possible to obtain a seat for IL 100.
Quality etrogim were sold for up to IL 5.000 and the price of a
shofar was IL 1.000.
Carter to get ARZA petitions
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Petitions containing the signatures
of more than 20,000 individuals demanding American recognition
of Jerusalem as Israel's capital have been presented to the White
House by ARZA—Association of Reform Zionists of America.
ARZA's delegation was led by its president. Rabbi Roland
Gittelsohn, and its executive director. Rabbi Ira Youdovin. They
were received by Edward Sanders, senior advisor to President
Carter, who promised to forward the petitions to the President.
Sadat sends treasure to Begin
TEL AVIV (JTA)—Interior Minister Yosef Burg, head of the
Israeli autonomy negotiating team, returned from the latest round
of talks in Alexandria recently with a special gift for Premier
Menachem Begin—an ancient scroll from Alexandria's once-
flourishing Jewish community that President Anwar Sadat
promised Begin when the Israeli leader visited Alexandria earlier
this year. Sadat granted his personal permission for transfer of the
scroll, a national treasure, to Israel.
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Physician’s opinion
Editor:
I read with sadness and
compassion the article that
appeared in your Sept. 28 issue
concerning the need for volunteers
to help “pattern” a little bOy with
severe developmental delay.
For the sake of these parents and
other parents facing this kind of
heartache, there are some
comments that I feel should be
made.
Whenever making a diagnosis
and prognosis in a young child,
one is always faced with the fact
that one is evaluating a very
immature brain. This immaturity*
precludes assessing all the
potential functions of that brain.
Some of my colleagues have been
too pessimistic too soon in
evaluating a child who was clearly
delayed. Very often that
premature, overstated, dismal
diagnosis can lead to a
presumption of “miraculous
improvements of cures” later on as
the child’s brain develops and
better potential than was initially
assessed comes to light.
A second consideration is the
factor of parental involvement.
There is nothing more devastating
than telling a parent that there is
“nothing they can do" to help a
child that they love. Any program
that promotes parent-child
interaction, gives a feeling of hope,
is going to have some degree of a
positive effect.
Patterning involves, as was
clearly stated, hours and hours of
monotonous repetition. The
emotional and physical toll that it
takes can truly be devastating to
the parents' relationship with each
other, with other nonhandicapped
children and with themselves. If
this was the only hope for that
child’s developmental salvation,
one might say, “well it is worth any
sacrifice.”
Those studies that have been
done, however, indicate that at
best, patterning produces results
which are no more positive than
those of a good, well thought-out
developmental program. Such a
program involves some modifica
tion of the way a child is handled,
fed, etc., but generally does not
involve more than perhaps an
additional hour of time during the
day. The effect is a normalization
of relationships between parents,
parent and child and the greater
community in which the family is
involved, and a total habitation
picture can be far more easily
achieved in this way.
I have personally seen patients
who have come out of years of
patterning with a dislocated hip,
with virtually no attention to
speech and language deficits that
could have been corrected earlier
in their life, if a multidisciplinary
approach had been used to their
developmental problems. I would
urge this family and others to
search carefully for a program that
gives hope without the potential
of destroying other members of
the family with the sheer, physical
demands of the program.
Those in the community who
know me are well aware of the fact
that I eagerly and openly assess all
treatment modalities in my effort
to help families with develop-
mentally delayed children and
after due consideration I have yet
to see anything in the literature or
in anecdotal information which
would have me recommend this
drastic method of treatment.
Linda Nathanson, M.D.
Chairman, Committee on the
Handicapped Child
Georgia Chapter of the
American Academy of Pediatrics
—Black speaks—
continued from page 4
that it is wrong to talk about
Palestinian human rights as long
as Israeli children live with the
prospect of death at Palestinian
hands. How can black leadership
even think about self-determina
tion for people who attack
children? To do so implicity
condones the murder of children.
Black leaders should know
about the murder of children, or
have we forgotten the four children
murdered in that Birmingham
church in 1963? And surely we've
forgotten that at the memorial
services and rallies after the
bombing, it was Jews, more so
than other Americans, who stood
beside us and shared our pain.
Black leadership insults this very
real part of black history, not to
mention insulting Jews, when it
says that Jewish support for the
black struggle was given when it
was “in their (Jews) best interest to
do so.” No, that is not true,
because those Jews who
supported, worked, and died in the
civil rights movement remembered
in their souls the pograms in
Russia, the Holocaust, the dying
that is so constant in Israel, and
because they remembered, they
made our struggle a part of their
lives.
That Jew* have not supported
affirmative action does nothing to
negate this. But this does not seem
good enough for black leadership,
which takes the position that the
support Jews gave in the past is to
be denigrated now. I cannot
understand whv black leadership
i
has acted as if Jews were
responsible for Andy Young’s
resignation. I thought Andy was
responsible for that, and, with
great dignity, he explained that he
needed to be free to speak as he
wished. But, as Western history
amply demonstrates, whenever
something goes wrong it is easy to
blame the Jews.
By doing so, black leadership
has shown inself to be morally
barren. By its support of the
Palestinians, it exemplifies a
callousness of spirit to the meaning
of the Holocaust, because when six
million Jews are killed while the
world is indifferent, the right of
Israel to exist is unassailable. That
is the only reasonable position I
think one can have on the Middle
East. Is black leadership unable to
perceive that the world is still
indifferent to the lives of Jews? We
shouldn't be, because the same
world is indifferent to black lives.
Are we unable to see that the
position of Jews in the world has
not changed significantly since
World War II? And what I hear in
the self-righteousness of black
leaders is, very simply, we don't
give a damn.
The irony is that this new
expression of anti-Semitism was
spearheaded by the organization
founded by Martin Luther King
Jr.—the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference. Dr. King
has been dead only 11 years, but
when I listen to his SCLC
successors, it is hard to believe that
Dr. King ever lived.
I missed him these past weeks.
because, for all my political
disagreements with him, he helped
me understand that though I suffer
by virtue of my race, I cannot
indulge that suffering. Neither can
I use suffering to crown myself
with a tiara of moral superiority. I
must learn to carry that suffering
as if it were a long-stemmed rose I
offer to humanity. I do that by
living with my suffering so
intimately as to never forget that,
having suffered evil, I must be
careful not to do something that
will, as Dr. King put it, “intensify
the existence of evil in the
universe.” Because I have suffered
as a black person, I do not
succumb to the thrill of making
others suffer. I look at my own
suffering and say, let this inhuman
suffering end here.
How quickly, how effortlessly
those who knew and worked with
Dr. King have forgotten that he
taught that “all life is interrelated.”
that “all humanity is involved in a
single process, and to the degree
that I harm my brother, to that
extent I am harming myself," and
that “creation is so designed that
my personality can only be fulfilled
in the context of community."
I am deeply sorry that black
leadership spoke as it did, because
my humanity as a black person was
diminished. The differences and
tensions between blacks and Jews
are real, but the positions espoused
recently by black leaders were not
“our Declaration of Independ
ence." as Kenneth Clark put it.
They merely showed that blacks,
too. can be Germans.
Page 5 THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE October 12, 1979