“monopoly” of Philanthropy in U.S. Jewish Life Attacked at Convention of Reform Rabbis

A four-fold program aimed at strengthening Jewish spiritual life in the United States was outlined here today at the Central Conference of American Rabbis by Dr. Maurice N. Eisendrath, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

Speaking before the 300 Reform rabbis attending the 61st annual session of the C.C.A.R., Dr. Eisendrath analyzed the role which Reform Judaism is now playing in American Jewish life and appealed to the rabbis to provide “the man power, the spiritual leadership and the tangible cooperation” for carrying out the following program:

“1. The stranglehold which the exclusively philanthropic enterprises enjoy in American Jewish life must be supplanted by a moral and religious program. Religious and ethical content must be emphasized in place of the monopoly that these temporary and tentative undertakings have on the funds and the effort of our communities.”

“2. The invigoration of our as yet all too weak and inadequate appeal to the unsynagogued to return to their true spiritual home, the Synagogue, as the sole hope for a frustrated American Israel and an otherwise doomed world.”

“3. The creation of a literate American Jewry out of a presently woefully illiterate one. Now that the state of Israel has been established, the hour is overripe for American Jewry no longer to hitch-hike and sponge on a distant and vicarious cultural accomplishment. Instead American Jewry must diligently pursue its own educational program.”

“4. We must concentrate our heaviest artillery in those areas which contain the heaviest preponderance of the Jewishly indifferent; in the great metropolitan centers of the Eastern seaboard, particularly in New York, where we find today the largest Jewish population in all Jewish history.”

“For such a four-fold realistic program the Union of American Hebrew Congregations has drawn its blueprints and formulated its strategy,” Dr. Eisendrath reported. “All that we now require is the generosity and the manpower, the spiritual leadership and the tangible cooperation which the rabbis of the Central Conference alone can and must provide.”