From: mstrait%cap.gwu.edu@VM.TAU.AC.IL (Michael Strait)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish
Subject: (none)
Date: 23 Dec 1992 00:53:23 -0600
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu


Dov Winer
Ben Gurion University
Internet : viner at bguvm.bgu.ac.il


----------------------------Original message----------------------------
To: viner@bguvm.bgu.ac.il
Subject: Bosnia Rally in Washington DC

Dov, I hope this reaches you with the long file attached.  I
was going to post it to Jewishnt but since I haven't been
subscribed from this address, I was afraid it might reject the
posting.  I would like to get back on the list if it is still
active.   In any event, would you please help me distribute
this document, or tell me where else I should send a copy.
Thanks.

Michael Strait

And the attachment should follow . . .

Dear Friends,

This evening, Tuesday, December 22, 1992, twenty-four
national Jewish organizations, joined by Christian clergy,
Members of Congress, and representatives of the Bosnian
and other ethnic communities of Central Europe, held a
rally opposite the soon-to-be-opened Holocaust Museum in
Washington, DC, to urge more vigorous action by the
American Government to protect the people of Bosnia.

Today is also, of course, the 27th day of Kislev, 5753,
in the Hebrew calendar, and the fourth night of Hannuakah,
the Festival of Lights.

Organizations endorsing the rally included:

Union of American Hebrew Congregations
Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America
Rabbinical Council of America
Rabbinical Assembly
United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism
National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council
Hadassah
Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington
American Jewish Committee
Central Conference of American Rabbis
Federation of Reconstructionist Congregations and Havorot
Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association
Jewish Labor Committee
Anti-Defamation League
Americans for a Progressive Israel
Synagogue Council of America
Women of Reform Judaism, NFTS
B'nai B'rith
National Council of Jewish Women
Women's American ORT
Women's League of Conservative Judaism
B'nai B'rith Women
Amit Women

About 250 people stood in the chill of the evening, sang
songs of freedom, lit candles, and listened to a moving
keynote statement by Leonard Fein, Senior Scholar at the
Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and then to
a series of readers of a 12-point statement titled,
"Bosnia, A Plea to the United States," which is being
delivered to the White House, the State Department, and
the Clinton Transition Office.

It is hardly enough, but at least it moved me to send this
message to you, and perhaps, collectively, our voices can
get some action.

Immediately below are Leonard Fein's remarks; and following
that the text of the Statement, along with a list of the
organizations that formally endorsed it and the individuals
who participated in reading the statement at the rally.

I encourage you to respond in some fashion, either to me or
to one of the organizations listed.  Any responses sent to
me will be forwarded to Rabbi David Saperstein, Director of
the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, who
coordinated the rally, and to Dr. Sidney Clearfield,
Executive Vice President of B'nai B'rith International.

Shalom,

Michael J. Strait

###########################################################

Remarks of Leonard Fein at the Bosnia Rally, 12/22/92, in
Washington, DC, in front of the Holocaust Museum.

When I was a child--I think it was in 1944, when I was ten
years old--my parents took me to a rally on behalf of
Jewish Children in Europe.  I was deeply touched, and when
I went home, I began to compile a scrapbook of pictures and
news reports that told of the plight of the children.

We didn't know it then, but by 1944 there weren't very many
Jewish children left in Europe.  And if when we leave this
place we go home to weep and to make scrapbooks, when the
clouds over Bosnia finally lift we will discover that our
tears and our sweet projects have been for naught; it will
be too late--too late for the children of Bosnia who are
dying of hunger and the women of Bosnia who are being gang-
raped and the men of Bosnia who are being killed by snipers
and by canon.  No, we have come here not to mourn together
nor to be inspired to write moving poems or assemble
elaborate scrapbooks.  We have assembled late this winter
afternoon to help alter the course of our nation's
behavior.  Not more, not less.

What have we meant over the course of the years when we
have so solemnly said, "Never again?"

We cannot have meant that evil was done, for we knew--we
must have known--that evil persists in this, our broken
world.

We cannot have meant that innocent people would no longer
suffer, and suffer brutally, for we knew--we must have
known--that there is terrible, heartbreaking injustice in
this, our fractured planet.

We cannot have meant that suddenly, men and women
everywhere would acknowledge the sanctity of human life not
only in word but also in deed, for we knew--we must have
known--that on this, God's earth, death and sorrow too
often fill the space between word and deed.

No, when we proclaimed "Never again," what we meant, what
we must have meant, all that we could have meant, the most
we could have meant, is that we, each of us who spoke those
words, who swore those words, was pledged to break the
silence.  Never again would we be silent in the face of
evil, never again would we bear mute witness to torture and
to terror, never again would we allow the world to turn its
back.  Not we, who better than others knew and know how it
can feel and what it can mean when the nations turn their
back.  Never ever again would we cluck our tongues and
shrug our shoulders and go on about our daily business.

My friends, there is evil, there is torture, there is
terror, there is  a world that chooses not to act, that
chooses to bemoan, to condemn, to deplore, and,
notwithstanding all its words, that chooses to act too
little too late, that thereby turns its back.

So now it it time for us to make good our oath, to redeem
our words.

Now it is time because in a place called Bosnia, which is
really not so very far away, at least one million six
hundred thousand people, human beings not so very different
from us, children of the very same God as we, have been
forced to flee from their homes, to wander through mountain
passes and friendless valleys in search of safe haven, this
in the name of a despicable doctrine know as "ethnic
cleansing," and in the name of that same doctrine, at least
150,000 people in Bosnia and Croatia have been caused to
die.  The men, women, children, and babies, who have been
killed, the women who have been raped, the victims of
torture, are not, as we are informed by Dr. Jack Geiger,
President of Physicians for Human Rights and a member of
the United Nations Human Rights Mission to Yugoslavia just
two months ago, casualties of the kind of high-tech
machinery the Nazis developed during World War II--gas
chambers and crematoria, sealed trains running on time,
meticulous record keeping.  They are instead the victims of
low-technology slaughter--human beings who have been
decapitated with chain-saws, beaten to death with clubs and
with boots, castrated, burned, all this not as the
incidental effect of a war but as the war's very purpose,
for this is a war of terror intended to cause the flight of
masses of people so that Bosnia will be clean, as if it is
the Muslims whose presence soils the land and not the
actions of those who terrorize them.

Let it be clear that it is the criminals of this war who
now stain the former Yugoslavia with a stain so foul that a
hundred years and more will not wash it away.

We are informed by Dr. Geiger that we may expect--and this
is a conservative estimate--400,000 deaths in these next
two months or so, deaths from wintertime exposure, from
malnutrition, from infection.  This we may expect unless
there is intervention.  and to put the case most simply and
most starkly, we have no reason to expect there will be
adequate intervention unless our voice is raised, today
and tomorrow and the next day and the next, until finally
we can all men and women of conscience prevail.

For us, in any event, there is no choice.  The very first
question that was ever asked, we are told, was God's
question to Adam: Where are you?  To that question, our
tradition permits only one answer: Hineni.  We are here.
We have spoken those words from the time of the first Jew,
our father Abraham, to the time of the Jewish Partisans in
the Forests of Poland, the chorus of whose stubborn anthem
was, "Mi zenen do," we are here.  And then, just a blink
after the first question, there comes the second, God's
question to Cain: Where is your brother?  As if to say that
if we do not know where our brother is, we cannot know
where we are.

My friends, our brothers and our sisters are in Bosnia
today, and we must tell them: we are here, mir zenen do,
hinenu.  And we will not turn our backs on them.

###########################################################

The Statement below was endorsed by the following
organizations:

Union of American Hebrew Congregations
Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America
Federation of Reconstructionist Congregations and Havurot
Central Conference of American Rabbis
Rabbinical Assembly
Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association
Synagogue Council of America
American Jewish Committee
American Jewish Congress
Anti-Defamation League
B'nai B'rith International
National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council
Hadassah
Women of Reform Judaism, NFTS
B'nai B'rith Women
Jewish Labor Committee
Americans for a Progressive Israel -- Hashomer Hatzair
Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington

Readers included:

Dr. Sidney Clearfield
Executive Director, B'nai B'rith International

Rabbi Eric Yoffie
Vice President and Director of Commission on Social Action

Valerie Kaplan
President, Federation of Reconstructionist Congregations
and Havurot

Jason Isaacson
Washington Representative, American Jewish Committee

Elaine Senter
National Vice President, Hadassah

Henry Siegman
Executive Vice President, American Jewish Congress

Bert Seidman
Vice President and Washington Representative
Jewish Labor Committee

Rabbi Donna Berman
Central Conference of American Rabbis

Rabbi Jack Moline
Rabbinical Assembly Social Action Chair

Laia Katz
Chairwoman of Critical Issues for NFTS
Women of Reform Judaism

Jess Hordes
Director, National Office, Anti-Defamation League

Rabbi Lynne Landsberg
Synagogue Council of America

Jack Serber
President, Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington

Rabbi Jerome Epstein
Executive Vice President
United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism

###########################################################

           BOSNIA: A PLEA TO THE UNITED STATES

PREAMBLE

        It is winter in Bosnia.  In Sarajevo, we are told,
three-quarters of the people who remain will not survive the
winter's cold.  There is no food for new-born infants; for
their mothers, there is only tea and rice or bread.  If that
is not enough to produce a mother's milk, her infant will
die.  It is time for effective action; hundreds of thousands
who will otherwise die can still be saved, but it is not
words that will save them.

        The persistent unwillingness of our nation, as of
any combination of nations, to intervene effectively against
the ongoing butchery in Bosnia, is both incomprehensible and
unacceptable.  It violates both decency and self-interest.

        Many months have now passed since the term "ethnic
cleansing" entered our vocabulary.  Many months have passed
since the first confirmed reports of rape, pillage,
concentration camps, and murder, of unspeakable atrocities
and cruelty.  These are not the casual side effects of war;
they are the very instruments of a war whose purpose is to
terrorize an entire population, to make of Bosnia's Muslims
either refugees or corpses, to make Bosnia Muslimrein.

        The horrors have elicited ringing threats and
condemnations, along with diverse modest interventions of
distressingly feeble consequence.  The condemnations have
long since become routine, the threats have been rendered
virtually meaningless by the failure adequately to enforce
them.

        Each day that passes brings still more death to
innocents, still more reminders of an earlier time in
Europe's history about which we have sworn, over and over,
"Never again."

        Our sorrow and our outrage derive no only from the
bitter memories we carry with us.  They derive from the
fact that we had imagined that the nations of the west, at
least, would not in the still lingering shadows of the
Kingdom of Night permit Night to fall again in Europe's
heartland.  We had believed that all the exhibits and the
museums and the monuments and the movies and the books had,
in the aggregate, furnished a somber--and adequate--warning
both to the would-be perpetrators of genocidal behavior and
to the witnesses thereto.

        We were, apparently, mistaken.

        There is one mistake we shall not be party to, a
mistake so grave it qualifies as sin: The mistake, the sin,
of silence.

        We are citizens of the United States of America.
With hearts made heavy by the continuing cruelty of which
we read, we assert our considered call upon our government.

CALL

1.  In these urgent and unusual circumstances, we call upon
President Bush, President-elect Clinton, and their senior
advisors, to meet together to formulate and announce an
American policy adequate to the crisis in Bosnia.  Innocent
people cannot be permitted to die simply because we are in
the midst of a presidential transition.

2.  The violence against civilians in the former Yugoslavia
in general and Bosnia in particular must, by whatever means
necessary, be halted.  By virtue of its stature, its power,
and its stated values, our own nation, acting in concert
with other nations when possible, acting alone if necessary,
must take a leadership role in ending it.  Since we have
chosen, through the imposition of an arms embargo, to
prevent the Muslims of Bosnia from defending themselves, we
are morally obliged to come to their defense.  Such defense
should include, as necessary, the use of multilateral
ground forces and air support.

3.  All those who participate in the practice of ethnic
cleansing must be informed that they will be regarded as
war criminals, and will be put to trial.  The relevant
provisions of the United Nations Genocide Convention should
be invoked; the contracting parties to that convention are
required, by its terms, to "prevent and punish" the crime
of genocide.

4.  All those who give or follow orders or who otherwise
engage in practices that contravene the fundamental
guarantees enumerated in Article 75 of the Geneva
Convention must be informed that they will by prosecuted.
Article 75 of the Geneva Convention prohibits, inter alia,
murder, torture of all kinds, mutilation, and outrages upon
personal dignity.  In this context, we call particular
attention to the sexual abuse, including gang rape, of
Bosnian women and girls.

5.  We call for the immediate establishment of safe haven
zones for civilians where they now live and where refugees
have gathered, and for the corollary announcement that
attacks of any kind on civilians in these zones will not
be tolerated.

6.  We call for the immediate implementation of United
Nations Resolution 770, which authorizes the use of "all
measures necessary" to ensure the delivery of humanitarian
relief in Bosnia.  We commend those European nations that
have deployed troops to provide such relief.  We urge them
to use the full authority they have been granted under
Resolution 770 to ensure their mission is accomplished,
and we call on the United States to provide such additional
support as circumstances may require in order to facilitate
that mission.  Specifically, attacks on relief convoys
should be met with swift and certain retaliation.

7.  We call on the United States, the United Nations, and
NATO to implement forthwith the United Nations "no fly"
resolution, and also to use their air superiority to strike
at military targets from which attacks upon civilians
emanate.

8.  If the nations remain reluctant to intervene
effectively, we call for an end to the boycott of arms and
military equipment to Bosnia.

9.  We call on the United States to take immediate steps
that will encourage Croatia and other states in the region
to open their doors to fleeing refugees.  One such step,
which we urgently recommend, is for the United States to
make available 25,000 resettlement admissions for refugees
from Bosnia and Hercegovina.  Particular consideration
should be given former civilian detainees, displaced
persons in mixed marriages, and homeless widows, many of
whom have been sexually abused.

10. We endorse the continuing efforts to achieve a
political settlement to the conflict.  However, we reject
the view that no more forceful action is warranted until we
are certain that such a settlement is not possible.

11. We call attention to the negative effects of passing UN
resolutions without authorizing their implementation.  We
deplore the negative effects of convening international
conferences that issue in ever harsher denunciations of the
violence but that do nothing to end the violence they
denounce.  We beseech participants in such conferences to
put an end to their condemnations and the denunciations
unless they are prepared to infuse them with meaning.

12. We call attention to the growing prospect that our
inaction in response to the brutality in the former
Yugoslavia will lead to its spread not only within that
region, but also to neighboring nations.  We believe that
there will come a day when we will no longer be able to
refrain from intervention, and we believe that the costs
and risks of intervention now will be considerably more
modest than the costs and risks of intervention once the
violence has spread beyond its present borders, engulfing
not only other areas of the former Yugoslavia but other
nations as well.  We call for immediate steps to insulate
Kosovo, Macedonia, and any other region of the former
Yugoslavia as well as immediately neighboring states from
the violence that Bosnia has experienced.

We issue this call on this, the 22nd day of the month of
December, 1992, which corresponds to the fourth night of
Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, a time when we recall
the brave battle of the few against the many for the sake
of freedom.  We light the candles this night in memory and
in hope: May we, all of us, once again find the strength to
stand against the tyrant, and may freedom's light again
prevail.

###########################################################
End of Message.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish