
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, May 29, 1990                   TAG: 9005290223
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ANTI-SEMITISM

ANTI-SEMITISM is on the rise in Eastern Europe despite a bitter irony: Except in Russia, not many Jews remain. Because so many millions were killed in places like Auschwitz, only relative handfuls of Jews are left - fewer than 5,000 in Poland, for example, and only 130,000 in all of Eastern Europe, counting both Germanys.

Even so, demonic demographics don't quiet the anti-Semitic refrain. Hate groups and acts of hatred are proliferating across Eastern Europe, according to news reports. Not that anti-Semitism ever went away, of course. It never does; it just breaks out at times with more virulent and overt expression. Now is such a time.

One reason must be that the new freedoms foster expression of centuries-old enmities. As the homogenizing influences of Soviet imperialism and communist ideology recede, the field is left open to ethnic rivalry.

Also, as Jews know too well, they have served a tragic function in history. They are scapegoats. And so, as communist nations transform into semi-market economies, creating spasms of social instability as they go, the search for objects of blame grows more desperate: blame for losing one's job, for variations in prosperity, for rising prices.

There's no end to the grievances anxious people may harbor, and Jews' blameworthiness has always stemmed from convenience, not culpability.

Adolf Hitler was deadlier than other anti-Semites because, partly by exploiting such grievances, he was able to seize state power and wield the instruments of government to serve his hateful ends. Yet even today, hatreds and governments aren't entirely divorced.

Even Mikhail Gorbachev, who has shown a most enlightened attitude toward Jewish emigration, apparently feels constrained from speaking out against anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.

His appeals to Russian nationalism, if helpful to his political survival, cannot but give comfort to nationalists of a baser sort, for whom love of Motherland is bound up with xenophobia and anti-Semitism.

Now is a time for vigilance, for practiced intolerance of the menacingly familiar patterns of prejudice. It is such a time even though and because, in Eastern Europe anyway, so few Jews are left to hate.

by CNB