Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 46, No. 4, Ed. 1 Thursday, January 23, 1992 Page: 2 of 24
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Feature 2 TEXAS JEWISH post, Thursday, January 23,1992-iN our 46th year!
The Wannsee Conference Revisited
By Abraham Foxman
NEW YORK (JTA) — Imagine the
outrage if a political candidate or his-
torian were to say: “Pearl Harbor was
not bombed,” or “There was no blitz in
London,” or “Hostages were never
taken in Iran.”
Yet as we approach the 50th anniver-
sary of the infamous Wannsee Confer-
ence — where the “final solution” was
codified by the Nazis — a vicious cam-
paign of Holocaust-denying is gaining
momentum across the nation. College
campus newspapers have been the
targets of Holocaust-denial advertise-
ments. It is on the lips of every profes-
sional anti-Semite in the nation.
Ironically, the legendary obsessive-
compulsive behavior of Hitler’s func-
tionaries, those ruthless bureaucrats
who would dare keep minutes of one of
humankind’s most obscene discussions,
have given the world the truth about the
murder of six million Jews.
Ever since the collapse of Hitler’s
Thousand-Year Reich, researchers have
been combing Nazi archives for the so-
called “smoking gun,” a direct order for
the total extermination of Europe’s
Jews.
No such written command has ever
been found. Yet Hitler never hid his
genocidal aims in the war against the
Jews, which the Germans waged to the
very end, even as it depleted manpower
and facilities that could have been used
more productively for military objec-
tives.
If there was no “smoking gun,” as
historical revisionists claim, how could
such a diversion of military power take
place when Germany was under the
combined assault of the Allied armies on
both fronts, east and west?
The answer may be found in a meeting
that took place 50 years ago, on Jan. 20,
1942, at a villa in the Berlin suburb of
Wannsee, of which the world was
unaware at the time and has taken little
notice of since.
Jews were already being killed in large
numbers, but the massacres were ran-
dom, spontaneous, undirected and un-
controlled.
The Wannsee Conference changed all
that.
It established a bureaucracy of exter-
mination which the SS and the Wehr-
macht implemented as they advanced
and eventually retreated, slaughtering
Jews all the while wth diabolic efficien-
cy.
Today, the civilized world knows
about the Wannsee Conference because
a copy of its minutes has been found.
The meeting was called by Reinhard
Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler’s deputy
and head of the Reich Security Main Of-
fice. At his side was his adviser on
Jewish affairs, Adolf Eichmann. Those
invited were the state secretaries of the
most important German ministries.
During his trial in Israel, Eichmann
stated that Heydrich had “expected con-
siderable stumbling blocks and difficul-
ties” from the assembled bureaucrats
but instead his proposal to implement a
see WANNSEE page 21
I Abraham Foxman
Lubavitcher Women Are Disappointed as Messiah Tarries
Bv Debra Nussbaum Cohen
NEW YORK (JTA) — Some 2,500
women crowded into the Lubavitch
movement’s Brooklyn, N.Y., headquar-
ters one recent Saturday night, each
hoping to personally witness messianic
revelation in the form of Menachem
Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher
rebbe.
It did not happen.
Despite the fervent devotion of the
dozen or so women who conceived and
organized the Jan. 4 melave malka, the
traditional post-shabbat meal, which
they hoped would turn into a kabbalat
panim, or welcoming reception, the
Messiah decided to tarry yet another
day.
The climactic moment came at about
midnight, when one of the organizers
announced to the hushed crowd that
someone had been sen' upstairs, to the
rebbe’s office, to asi mm to come down.
The women bowed their heads and
created their own private emotional
spaces within the crowded quarters.
Some had tears running down their
cheeks. One murmured “please, please”
over and over again, as she beseeched
the Messiah to make his presence
known. But to no avail.
The intensity of those minutes passed,
and the next of the speakers, some of
whom had come from as far away as
Australia and Israel, took his place
behind the microphone.
The speakers all congratulated the
women, praised them for their efforts
and urged them to continue to spread
the messianic message.
“There are mockers and knockers,
critics and skeptics waiting to pick up on
something that will turn them away
from our aspirations,” said Rabbi
Chaim Gutnick, chief rabbi of
Melbourne, Australia. “I want them to
join us! If you want Mashiach, talk
about it, stir about it, break the world
up about it!”
And with the indefatigable faith
typical of Lubavitch, the Messiah’s
failure to appear simply spurred the
women to redouble their efforts. Before
the evening was over, there was talk of
convening a second kabbalat panim —
in New York’s 20,000-seat Madison
Square Garden.
“We shall go on and on until there
will be a legion of the king. You will
see,” said Devorah Gitchel, one of the
evening’s participants.
The event was remarkable in Crown
Heights, for it was entirely conceived
and executed by women, with a
prerequisite blessing from the rebbe, of
course, and a dollar for charity — a
Susan B. Anthony silver dollar.
Slated to begin at 9 p.m., by 8:30
every seat at the long, food-laden tables
inside 770 Eastern Parkway was taken.
At 8:45, women were still streaming into
the building, donating $7.70 for charity
at the door.
By 9:00 the place was packed. High
school girls, newly married young
women barely out of their teens, middle-
aged women and grandmothers all
crowded uncomplainingly into a space
I Menachem Mendel Schneerson
meant for half as many people.
Through the Lubavitch movement’s
see MESSIAH page 21
L.A. Rally for Pollard Signals Growing Support
By Tom Tugend
LOS ANGELES (JTA) — American
Jews, Israel’s leaders and the U.S.
government share the guilt for Jonathan
Jay Pollard’s continued imprisonment,
a prominent Reform rabbi charged at a
support rally for the former naval in-
telligence analyst now serving a life sen-
tence for passing classified documents to
Israel.
By not protesting Pollard’s sentence,
“the American Jewish community bears
a collective guilt for being so timorous
and afraid of (being accused of) dual
loyalty,” Rabbi Isaiah Zeldin of
Stephen S. Wise Temple told some 600
persons in the temple’s sanctuary Jan.
12.
The leaders of Israel are guilty for
waiting six years before taking some in-
terest in the case, Zeldin said, adding
that “the most guilty is the U.S. govern-
ment, from the prosecutor to the White
House. The government double-crossed
Jonathan and the entire Jewish com-
munity."
The pro-Pollard rally, the first of its
kind in Los Angeles, gave further evi-
dence that while large segments of
American Jewry feel it improper to
become involved in the case, outspoken
support for Pollard is becoming more
widespread and “respectable.”
One indication was the caliber of
Speakers at the temple, headed by Sey-
mour Reich, one of American Jewry’s
most prominent voices as the former
president of B’nai B’rith International
and the former chairman of the Confer-
ence of Presidents of Major American
Jewish Organizations.
He was joined by senior officials of
the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Board
of Rabbis of Southern California, and
the black Los Angeles City councilman.
Professor Morris Pollard, Jonathan’s
father, also spoke.
Reich, a New York attorney, outlined
four stages in the Jewish community’s
attitude toward Pollard, after his guilty
plea and sentencing following his arrest
in November 1985.
The first stage, said Reich, was
marked by outrage at Pollard’s espion-
age and at the role of the Israeli govern-
ment in “running” an American Jew as
a spy against his own government.
In a second stage, the first voices of
sympathy and protest were raised
publicly on behalf of Pollard’s wife at
the time. They are now divorced.
Anne Pollard, sentenced to five years
imprisonment as an accessory after the
fact, was reportedly denied medical
treatment during her incarceration.
The Persian Gulf War, particularly
Iraq’s Scud attacks on Tel Aviv, convin-
ced a growing number of people in the
third stage that Pollard had been
morally, though not legally, justified in
passing secret documents on Arab mili-
tary strength to Israel.
Now in the fourth stage, said Reich,
the American Jewish community is
beginning to express itself more loudly
that “Pollard got a raw deal and enough
is enough.”
see POLLARD page 21
IJonathan Ja\ Pollard
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Wisch, J. A. & Wisch, Rene. Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 46, No. 4, Ed. 1 Thursday, January 23, 1992, newspaper, January 23, 1992; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth753627/m1/2/: accessed June 29, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .