Israelis Mark Holocaust, Assail Reagan Plan to Visit Cemetery

Israeli leaders, marking the annual Holocaust remembrance day Thursday, lashed out at President Reagan’s plan to visit a German military cemetery during his visit to West Germany next month.

In Jerusalem, Israelis stood at attention for two minutes in the morning rush hour as sirens wailed throughout the city to honor the 6 million European Jews murdered in the Holocaust of World War II.

Pedestrians immediately stopped in their tracks and stood at attention. Drivers braked their cars and let them idle, snarling traffic. In schools, memorial services for Jews slain in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi extermination camps began at the sound of the sirens.

Not Appeased

Various Israeli officials denounced Reagan’s decision to visit the cemetery at Bitburg, which contains graves of German soldiers slain during World War II, including some members of the Waffen SS elite force. The Israelis said they were not appeased by the President’s decision to add a concentration camp to his agenda.

“The President is a true friend of the Jewish people and a great friend of Israel, but whoever proposed that he visit the cemetery greatly misled him,” said former Israeli President Yitzhak Navon, now deputy prime minister and the education minister.

“You can’t visit a concentration camp and pay tribute to the murderers at the same time,” he told Israel radio.

Knesset Criticism

Members of the Knesset, or Parliament, criticized Reagan’s reasoning that the cemetery visit would honor West Germany’s democracy 40 years after the end of World War II and promote a spirit of reconciliation.

“The cemetery is not part of today’s democracy,” said Knesset member Haika Grossman, who fought against the Nazis in the Bialystok ghetto in Poland. “The cemetery is of soldiers of the Third Reich.”

In an editorial, the Jerusalem Post accused Reagan of being too willing to “bury the hatchet” with Germany.

The newspaper said Reagan is “willing to forget and forgive the evil incarnate that was Hitlerism in order to better enlist the Germans in the alliance to counter the Soviet ‘evil empire.’ ”

Earlier, at a rally at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres alluded to the Reagan visit, saying one could be reconciled with former enemies “but not with evil.”

Reagan’s Views

In Washington, Reagan said Thursday he will go ahead with plans to visit the cemetery because to do otherwise “would leave me looking as if I caved in to unfavorable attention.”

Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in a rare public announcement, warned against attempts to deny the Holocaust.

“Before our very eyes, an attempt is being made to deny that 6 million Jews--men, women and children--were led by Nazi Germany and its partners to the pits, to the trucks belching poison, to the gas chambers, to the crematoria,” said Begin, who has been in seclusion since he resigned in October, 1983.

He said learned people in various countries are claiming that the destruction of European Jews by the Nazis never happened.