Central Conference of American Rabbis Urges Jewish Unity Before United Nations

The American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Conference were urged to meet jointly “to the end that American Jewry and other groups be united and speak as one voice for all of Jewry before the United Nations,” in a resolution adopted here today at the 58th annual convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, attended by more than 400 of its 575 members.

The convention also adopted a resolution endorsing the Stratton Bill to admit 400,000 displaced persons to the United States. Another resolution urged the National Jewish Welfare Board to set up a Jewish history council, similar to the Jewish Book Council and Jewish Music Council, to promote a Jewish history week “devoted to furtherance of the study of our people and their ideals.”

The convention also resolved to urge the United Nations Committee on Palestine “to visit the European DP camps in the course of its itinerary” because the problem of Palestine cannot be divorced from the problem of Europe’s homeless Jews. The convention deplored “the use of violence in Palestine as both immoral and harmful to the Jewish cause,” but also vigerously condemned “the repressive measures invoked by the British authorities in Palestine which give rise to a violence born of desperation.” It urged “free immigration and colonization in Palestine and immediate revocation of the British White Paper.”

The convention expressed “profound regret” that the United States Congress failed to sustain President Truman’s veto of the Taft-Hartley labor legislation. The rabbis also expressed opposition to compulsory military training, the enactment of Federal F.E.P.C. legislation and anti-lynching legislation, and asked the President to free conscientious objectors still in jail.

DR. SILVER ASKS U.S. TO AID INTERIM IMMIGRATION TO PALESTINE

The United States Government was urged to “exert itself anew in behalf of interim arrangements which would make it possible for a substantial number of displaced Jews in Europe to go to Palestine at once, pending the final recommendations of the Assembly of the United Nations,” by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, in his presidential address last night opening the convention.

Describing the Palestine situation as having deteriorated since last year, Dr. Silver demanded “decisive” action on the part of the U.S. He called on the U.S. to give the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine some idea of its policy on the Holy Land, “not in order to exert pressure,” but to save the committee “from the fate of spending itself in futile abstractions” and prevent the U.N. General Assembly “from arguing itself into a humiliating impasse.”