NY rabbi locks horns with CBS's Safer, Fager (11/13/94)

NY rabbi locks horns with CBS's Safer, Fager

by Andrij Wynnyckyj

NEW YORK - As recorded on the pages of The Weekly, Rabbi David Lincoln, the English-born leader of the congregation at Park Avenue synagogue in New York City, wrote letters to CBS News (dated October 25) denouncing the imbalances, inaccuracies and defamations in the "The Ugly Face of Ukraine" segment of "60 Minutes," and then to Ukraine's ambassador to the United Nations, Anatoliy Zlenko (dated October 31), offering assistance in countering the program's various slanders (see page 4).

Then, on November 1, he received a conference call from the producer of the segment, Jeffrey Fager, and its reporter, Morley Safer, in reply. In the ensuing conversation, Rabbi Lincoln said the two CBS journalists tried to cajole him into accepting their position.

Contacted by The Weekly, Rabbi Lincoln said he locked horns with the pair over a contention that "Jews [in Ukraine] are living in great fear," which he countered by saying that, although Jews are now free to leave, many are choosing to stay and are establishing schools and summer camps throughout the Lviv region, "the fertile ground" for anti-Semitism as alleged in the CBS broadcast.

He also rejected the segment's allegations that there are no memorials of Jewish suffering, citing the large monument in central Lviv (with plaques in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian and English) to the victims of the city's ghetto; as well as plaques and memorials he had seen in Ivano-Frankivske and Kolomyia.

The distraught religious leader said it was obvious "I had to he exceedingly careful with them," and mentioned Rabbi Bleich's experience of having given an extensive interview, out of which snippets were taken "that distort everything one says."

Rabbi Lincoln said he had encountered no negative reaction from the local Jewish community in the wake of his public stand against CBS, apart from a lone caller from Wisconsin, but expected that this might increase once his letter receives wider currency in the Jewish press. He dismissed suggestions that his move had been premature and voiced a willingness to work with any effort geared to redressing the damage done by CBS's programming.

Rabbi Lincoln said his father, F. Ashe Lincoln, 87, also English-born, a barrister and leading Queen's Counsel in London, became interested in Ukraine because he learned of Ukrainian support for the Jewish drive for equal rights in the Austnan Parliament (see Turning the Pages, October 23) and for support in defeating a Polish Parliament-imposed ban on Jewish religious rites in the early 1930s. Mr. Lincoln, Q.C., aided Ukrainian groups in the 1930s that lobbied England's House of Commons for support.

Rabbi Lincoln himself translated, from Yiddish into English, the book "Jewish Autonomy in Ukraine," written by Moses Silberfarb, the vice-minister for Jewish affairs and Jewish autonomy under the first Ukrainian Rada government of 1917. He traveled to Ukraine last November, at the invitation of Rutgers University Prof. Taras Hunczak, who was conducting a seminar series there. He then traveled extensively throughout western Ukraine, meeting with Jewish communities and conducting services.

Rabbi Lincoln arrived in the U.S. from England in 1967, and after an initial two-year term in Kansas City, served as the head of a congregation in Chicago for 18 years. He became the chief rabbi at the Park Avenue synagogue in 1987.

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