American Jewry Criticized for Silence on Pollard

Arutz7 News - November 12, 2003

Eli Joseph, one of the most veteran activists on behalf of Jonathan Pollard, has some blistering criticism of American Jewry for abandoning Pollard to his fate: 18 years, so far, in prison. He told Arutz-7 this morning,

"We asked some NRP and Likud delegates in the Jewish Agency and the Zionist movement, in the framework of the General Assembly [next week's premiere event of United Jewish Communities, representing 156 Jewish federations and 400 North American communities], to raise the topic of Pollard - but they refused. There is a fear of raising anything that will upset American Jewry. Likud government ministers, too, don't want to speak about it."

"The relations today between Israel and Diaspora/U.S. Jewry are based on the following distorted verse: 'Give me the property, and the souls take for yourself' [based on the verse at the end of Genesis 14, which states the opposite]. It's as if the Jewish Agency has become just a philanthropic agency to give Israel money, but [with no concern] for problems of the soul, such as assimilation and the like. But this cannot be! The Zionist movement began over 100 years ago precisely out of a concern for another Jew who had been unfairly punished - Alfred Dreyfus, who was unfairly accused of spying against France; but today, Jonathan Pollard is suffering the same fate... yet American Jewry is not only largely ignoring him, but are being cruel to him.

"Jews are among those who initiated a lobby against a pardon for Pollard - because they are always afraid of being accused of having dual loyalty. When Jews came to Roosevelt during the Holocaust and asked him to do something dramatic, he said to them, 'Know that you are first of all Americans.' ... Pollard said that he didn't want to allow history to repeat itself, and that's why he did what he did. He wrote later that he was 'willing to rot in prison rather than to sit shiva [in mourning] for hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews who were liable to get killed because of my cowardice' - and then American Jews quote him and say, 'Look, he does not regret his actions!' ... The Americans put his body in jail, but American Jewry and Israel together are leaving his soul in jail."