290	The Story of the Jewish Defense League

byouth who said he was a spokesman for the group. . . .He bsaid the dumping of the frogs on a secretary’s desk was b‘beautiful—everyone was screaming.’

b“The mice were released from airline flight bags in Am- btorg’s reception area. . . .Policemen who had to cope with bboth the mice and the frogs said only that ‘the mice were not brecovered.’

b“No arrests were made in the Amtorg incident, but two byouths were arrested at the Aeroflot office. The incident bthere was described by a police sergeant at the precinct, who bsaid of the frogs: ‘Of course they were jumping up and bdown and getting everybody jumping with them.’”

bEverybody. The news was flashed all over the world, and bpeople roared with laughter, except for the furious Soviets band a pygmy named Rabbi Wolfe Kelman who condemned bthe marvelously imaginative maneuver. Kelman, the execu- btive vice-president of the Conservative rabbis’ official body, ba man whose problems derived from an Orthodox Jewish bbackground that weighed heavily on him, ludicrously in- btoned a warped moralism, stating that Jews “do not rejoice bin the suffering of their oppressors.” Leaving aside such b“un-Jewish” holidays that joyfully commemorate Jewish vic- btory over their oppressors as Hanukkah or Purim—where bJewish custom is to bang on the floor and shake the bsynagogue with noisemakers every time Haman’s name is bmentioned—Jewish militants agreed not to rejoice, only to bsolemnly continue our assault on the oppressors while Kel- bman continued his parasitical existence with Jewish com- bmunal funds.

bNine days later, Amtorg was visited by something much bmore serious than mice when a powerful bomb went off, bheavily damaging the nineteenth-floor offices of the Soviets. bA series of phone calls to the police, warning them to bevacuate the building, enabled all workers employed above bthe nineteenth floor to be evacuated before the bomb went boff. A call to the United Press International at 5:20 PM, bminutes before the blast, said: “Free all Jewish prisoners. bLet my people go. Never again!” We declared that we knew bnothing of the incident.