Jewish Leaders Hail Pledge but Still See Insensitivity

American Jewish leaders Sunday saluted President Reagan’s eloquence in pledging to “never forget” the horrors of Nazi concentration camps but said that he showed insensitivity to the depths of Jewish feelings about the Holocaust by visiting a cemetery where the 1,887 German war dead include 49 Nazi SS combat soldiers.

The tenor of the reaction of several Jewish leaders indicated that Reagan’s comments while touring the Bergen-Belsen death camp had partly muted the intense criticism of his joining West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in laying a wreath at the Bitburg cemetery.

Reagan was “marvelously eloquent” in his address at the concentration camp site, the president of the American Jewish Committee, attorney Howard I. Friedman of Los Angeles, said in an interview. Friedman said that Reagan “spoke of the positive things we totally share and embrace,” but he added that the visit to the cemetery, which his organization and other Jewish and veterans groups had urged be canceled, “was an error.”

Historian Elie Wiesel, chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council and a concentration camp survivor, called the Bitburg visit “totally unnecessary” but said the Reagan trip might prove beneficial if it brings alive the lessons of Nazi atrocities for a generation too young to remember.

“I do believe that the public has learned more, an educational process has been set in motion and we . . . are going to work harder in the future so that this awakening will have some basis,” Wiesel said on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press.”

Secretary of State George P. Shultz, said that the visits to the death camp and cemetery were “an insurance policy on ‘never again.’ ” Appearing on “This Week with David Brinkley” on ABC-TV, Shultz called it “a stunning day” for Reagan and rejected suggestions that the presidential visit to the cemetery gave the impression that the atrocities of Adolf Hitler’s SS elite force should be forgotten in favor of forgiveness.

“I don’t think there was any element in it of forgetting,” Shultz said. “We don’t want to forget. We want to learn.”

Marshall Breger, who is Reagan’s special assistant for liaison with Jewish groups, said that “the people I have spoken with expressed their gratitude for the President’s comments.” But, referring to the monthlong controversy over the cemetery visit, Breger said “the pain is still there” and “we are still in the eye of a hurricane.”

Indeed, ceremonies and protests at a score of locations across the United States focused on the Bitburg visit.

At Arlington National Cemetery, Benjamin Meed, president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, was greeted with sustained applause at ceremonies commemorating the liberation of the Nazi death camps when he said: “There can be no reconciliation between murderers and their victims. We must not betray our martyrs.”

Flanked by the banners of the U.S. military divisions that freed many of the concentration camp victims 40 years ago, Meed said that Reagan sent “the wrong message to the world” by laying the wreath because it implied that all the war dead are the same.

“The German nation was willingly mobilized to carry out the Nazi policies and therefore shares in the moral responsibility for the destruction they brought,” Meed said.

In New York, a crowd that Mayor Edward I. Koch estimated that about 250,000 joined in a march and rally to show solidarity with Soviet Jews, but said that Reagan’s Bitburg visit was also a focal point. “Bitburg will never be forgotten,” Koch told the crowd. “It is a stain on the history and record of the President.”

Nathan Perlmutter, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, also criticized the President’s Bitburg visit as showing “an insensitivity to the victimized dead.” However, Perlmutter said Reagan has shown sensitivity in the past and “as we all want to be judged by our full records, rather than our worst lapses, so should the President be judged.”

Kenneth J. Bialkin, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said: “Obviously we have differences over Bitburg and obviously a good deal of pain has been caused by it. . . . But having done that, he (Reagan) is the same man he was before. Like anything else, you go and build on areas of common interest.”

Hyman Bookbinder, Washington representative of the American Jewish Committee, said that “going to Bitburg was a mistake” but that Reagan’s words at the concentration camp “still have great meaning.”

“This is indeed a sad day because it could have been a tremendous and positive day,” Bookbinder said on the ABC-TV interview show. Wiesel, appearing on the same program, said that “the wounds are there, and the wounds are deep.” He added, though, “In the long run, I’m sure the wounds will heal.”

The American Legion had also opposed the cemetery visit, but in Indianapolis, National Commander Clarence Bacon said: “It seems to me in listening to the President’s speech that he had a very upbeat and positive statement . . . to further reconciliation between the United States and Germany.”

That clearly was the view Administration officials hoped would emerge from the day’s events.

“I was proud of my President today,” Assistant Secretary of State Richard R. Burt, who is slated to be nominated as the new U.S. ambassador to West Germany, said on “Meet the Press.”

“It was an enormously difficult task. This was a very controversial day. He had to deal . . . with conflicting emotions--very deep-seated emotions. He had on the one hand to impress people with the fact, as he himself said, that we can never forget. And at the same time, he had to remind people that we are friends--not just allies.”

He predicted that once the controversy over the trip subsides “most Americans will support him.”

Still, Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal insisted that Reagan’s appearance at the concentration camp did not offset the negative impact of the cemetery visit. “No, absolutely not,” he said in response to a question on the CBS program “Face the Nation.”

“You cannot neutralize it by going to a concentration camp when you are on the same day going to a cemetery with SS.”