The right words 1

The caption under my photo accompanying the article about the late Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytskyi ("He did all that was possible - he saved 150 Jews", January ) quoted me as saying: "There is a tendency in Jewish collective memory not to look at other victims of the Holocaust, including Poles and Ukrainians." This is misleading. What I actually said is that although Jews were the number one victims of the Second World War and the Holocaust, among the other victims of the war but NOT the Holocaust were Poles and Ukrainians.

My intention was to point out that there were different kinds and gradations of victimhood in those terrible times. It is precisely because of the overwhelming sense of victimhood that Jewish and Israeli public opinion tends to overlook the complexities and problems that affected other nationalities as well as public and spiritual leaders such as Sheptytskyi.

Shimon Redlich

Ben-Gurion University, Israel