Jews will not forgive —Israeli Minister

Press, 8 May 1985, Page 10

Jews will not forgive —Israeli Minister

NZPA-Reuter Jerusalem

The Israeli Defence Minister, Mr Yitzhak Rabin, said yesterday that the Jewish people would not forgive the President of the United States, Mr Ronald Reagan, for equating Nazi troops buried at the Bitburg war cemetery to Jews killed in the Nazi holocaust. His criticism, the strongest yet by an Israeli leader, was made at a ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial commemorating the fortieth anniversay of the defeat of Nazi Germany.

“The President’s historic mistake was in equating the murderers to their victims,” Mr Rabin said. "For this, enlightened humanity and the Jewish people will not forgive him.” Mr Reagan defended his Bitburg visit by saying that some of the soldiers buried there had been teen-agers pressed into service who were victims of Nazism “just as surely as the victims of the concentration camps.” Sombrely lauding “the victory of humanity over

Satan,” the Prime Minister, Mr Shimon Peres, again stated Israel’s sorrow over Bitburg but said, “I believe that President Reagan is a true friend of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.

“It is precisely for this reason that we feel deep pain at the terrible error of his visit to Bitburg,” he said.

A former Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, said that Mr Reagan’s visit was “one of the saddest days in the history of the Jewish people.” He declined comment on remarks by a former Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon, who suggested that Mr Peres had not protested strongly over the Bitburg visit. Mr Sharon was quoted by Israel radio as saying that Mr Begin, a Right-wing hardliner, “would have known how to talk to the goyim (non-Jews).” Left-wingers have also criticised the Peres Government for what they viewed as a low-key reaction to Bitburg. A Leftist Parliamentar-

ian, Yosef Sarid, of the Opposition Citizens’ Rights Movement, said that Israel’s Government had been “overcome by silence” because it wanted an additional SUSI.S billion in United States aid. Thousands of Americans, many of them holocaust survivors, gathered at hundreds of demonstrations across the nation, protesting against Mr Reagan’s visit to the cemetery at Bitburg. “They should never be honoured,” said Meyer Shnurman at a memorial service in Des Moines, lowa. He said that he and his wife, Frances, were held at several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Dachau, Stutthof, and'Lodz. “We feel Reagan meant good but his advisers steered him wrong on this. If he would go where Americans were buried, it would be different.”

“He says they were just young kids, young soldiers. Well we were just young, too, and the thousands, millions of people they lined up to be killed, many of them were young,” he said.