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March 18, 2005/Adar II 7 5765, Volume 57, No. 29
Great Lakes Region YWCA denounces anti-Israel report
DEBORAH SUSSMAN SUSSER
Associate Editor
The steering committee of the Great Lakes Region of the YWCA unanimously endorsed the Pacific Region's resolution denouncing the controversial Witness Report.
It took the action March 16, according to Eileen Mershart, executive director of the YWCA of Madison.
"I think it's great," Janet Marcotte, executive director of the YWCA of Tucson, which belongs to the Pacific Region, told Jewish News. "I think it's very significant."
The Witness Report is an account of a visit to the Middle East by 14 members of the World YWCA last spring, written by Doris Pagelkopf, an American representative on the World board, who concluded that Israelis were trying to "rid the land of Palestinians" just as "Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews."
The same resolution denouncing the report had been voted down by the YWCA's National Coordinating Board (NCB) at a meeting here in Phoenix on Feb. 13 and referred to the national YWCA's World Relations Committee, of which Pagelkopf is a member.
Marcotte said she was "hopeful that we can get this back on the NCB's table. Our goal is to get the resolution passed by the World Relations Committee (at their meeting in Washington, D.C., on March 31) and then back to the NCB for their meeting," which will take place the next day, also in Washington, D.C.
Meanwhile, a March 8 conference call for members of the Middle East task force, which is a subcommittee of the World Relations Committee, was cancelled, according to Barbara Lewkowitz, a member of the task force and the former executive director of the Maricopa County YWCA. The next meeting of the task force will take place at the YWCA of the USA national meeting in Washington later this month. Lewkowitz, who is traveling in China, will be unable to attend.
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