FROM OUR ARCHIVES
50 YEARS AGO
April 23, 1968
A Polish official, in a dedication speech at a memorial museum on the site of the Auschwitz Nazi death camp, warned Poles not to let the then-current anti-Zionist campaign get out of hand. At the same time, however, culture minister Lucyan Motyka denounced Israeli “aggression” in the Middle East. Motyka, a former Auschwitz inmate himself, apparently was seeking a middle course between Polish anti-Zionist pronouncements and purges of Jews and its proclaimed concern for the 18,000 Jews still remaining in Poland. He said that he hoped those who visited the Auschwitz museum would “draw proper conclusions and appropriate evaluations as regards the present.” But he said the World War II deaths of six million Polish citizens – half of them Jews – gave his country a moral right to protest against violence and attacks. He said that Poland stood on the side “of the weak and attacked” in the Middle East.
10 YEARS AGO
April 23, 2008
Ben-Ami Kadish, an 85-year-old former US Army mechanical engineer, was arrested on charges he slipped classified documents about nuclear weapons to an employee of the Israeli Consulate who also received information from convicted Pentagon spy Jonathan Pollard, US authorities announced. Prosecutors said Kadish, a US citizen who worked at an army base in New Jersey, took home classified documents for six years and let Israelis photograph them in his basement. Those documents included information about nuclear weapons, a modified version of an F-15 fighter jet, and the US Patriot missile air defense system. The criminal complaint said that Kadish had accepted no cash in return for the documents, only small gifts and occasional dinners for him and his family. Kadish admitted to the charges in court, saying that he wanted to help Israel.
A Romanian court classified Israel as too dangerous a state for two young Israeli-born children to be returned there. The ruling pertained to the case of an Israeli father who claimed that his Romanian wife was keeping the children there without his consent. An initial judgment ruled in favor of the father. However, on appeal, two out of three Romanian judges on the case ruled against the father, referring to a clause in the international law regarding child abductions and returning a child to a country at war or one that was considered a “serious risk” to the child’s safety. This was not the first time a Romanian court had accepted the “dangerous country” argument in a case of suspected international child abduction. The defense was also used successfully in a 2002 abduction in Australia.
Messianic Jews were entitled to Israeli citizenship according to the Law of Return if their father was Jewish, according to a precedent-setting ruling handed down by the High Court of Justice. Fifteen years earlier, the court rejected a petition by Messianic Jews who demanded to be recognized as Jews so as to automatically receive Israeli citizenship according to the Law of Return. In that landmark case, the court ruled that Messianic Jews had converted, and therefore were no longer Jewish. The new petitioners argued that they were eligible for new immigrant status and citizenship because they were the offspring fathers who were Jewish, not because they themselves were Jewish.