ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times

DATE: Tuesday, February 4, 1997              TAG: 9702040109
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL   PAGE: A-1  EDITION: METRO 
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Associated Press

A POSSIBLE HOLOCAUST HERITAGE

THE NEW SECRETARY OF STATE, Madeleine Albright, prompted by strange letters and complaints from Arab countries, researched her roots. She was surprised.

A churchgoing Roman Catholic as a young girl and a practicing Episcopalian as an adult, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Monday she has concluded she was born Jewish. She also has learned two of her grandparents may have perished in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Calmly discussing her background in an interview, Albright said, ``This obviously was a major surprise to me. I had never been told this.

``I do believe this to be a personal issue, but since it is an object of discussion, I would just as soon have you know what I know.''

Albright, 59, began exploring her ancestry after her nomination by President Clinton in December brought a flood of letters - some ``completely off the wall'' - from people who claimed to have known her family.

Her appointment also drew complaints in some parts of the Arab world, as did the defense-secretary nomination of William Cohen, whose father was Jewish.

Albright's parents were both Jews, but did not practice the religion, she said. Her father, Josef Korbel, was a Czech diplomat who fled Czechoslovakia with his family for Britain after the 1938 Munich agreement turned over part of the country to Nazi Germany.

Her parents had converted to Catholocism in the early part of the war and the family was ``fairly religious,'' she said. ``I never thought of myself as anything else.'' They left Czechoslovakia when she was just a year old.

In 1959, upon her marriage, she became an Episcopalian and today occasionally attends church. She is divorced and has three daughters.

State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said Albright came to the conclusion she was Jewish last week, based on the letters and from documents provided to her by reporters looking into her background.

``I started to think about it, and to put pieces together. There was more and more information, and it began to make more sense to me,'' Albright said.

Burns dismissed any suggestion her ancestry would complicate Mideast peace efforts. She would not be the first Jewish secretary of state; German-born Henry Kissinger worked out two partial agreements between Israel and Syria in the 1970s.

``It's not going to have any effect on her performance as secretary of state. ... It has nothing to do with her job,'' Burns said.

As ambassador to the United Nations, Albright blocked Arab efforts to push the Security Council to condemn Israel for the shelling of a U.N. base in south Lebanon that killed at least 91 civilians. She also vetoed a resolution declaring invalid Israel's expropriation of Arab-owned land in east Jerusalem.

Her defense of Israel was consistent with longstanding U.S. policy.

``The appointment of Albright will virtually make Tel Aviv the capital of the United States, and not Washington,'' Egyptian columnist Moustafa Amin wrote weeks ago in the As-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper, which is Saudi-owned and published in London.

Both Albright's parents were born in small towns in Czechoslovakia. They were in the first generation of the pre-war democratic Czechoslovakia, and the spoke to their children in terms of their ``political existence,'' not their religious background, she recalled.

Albright's father was a press attache in Yugoslavia at the war's outset. His association with Eduard Benes, the democratic president of Czechoslovakia, impelled him to flee to London, where he sought a job as a reporter for a Yugoslav newspaper, then worked for the Czech government in exile.

Returning to Prague after Germany's defeat, he resumed his diplomatic career, then left with his family for the United States when Czechoslovakia fell to Soviet control.

Did she know she was Jewish? ``No,'' she replied, though, she said: ``I knew a great deal about my parents.''

She said the information that her father's parents died in Auschwitz ``seems fairly compelling to me but I want to check it out, obviously.''

LENGTH: Medium:   80 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  AP. One of the things Madeleine Albright learned was 
          that her father's parents may have perished in the Auschwitz 
          concentration camp. color.