N.c.r.a.c. Committee to Reassess Goals in Community Relations Field

The National Community Relations Advisory Council, coordinating body of the Jewish organizations engaged in combating anti-Semitism in this country, today announced the formation of a Special Committee on Reassessment of goals in the community relations field. The committee will hold its first meeting on March 3, the announcement said.

Such a committee was recommended by the Evaluative Studies Committee of the N.C.R.A.C., based on the survey by Professor Robert M. MacIver of the Jewish community relations agencies. The N.C.R.A.C. plenary session last November unanimously adopted a resolution endorsing this recommendation as part of a comprehensive program looking toward improved coordination of planning and programs in the community relations field.

“Creation of the Special Committee on Reassessment,” said Irving Kane, N.C.R.A.C. chairman, “marks a major step toward the effectuation of the resolution adopted in Atlantic City. The task of the committee is to deliberate upon problems basic to the work of the entire field. This committee is concerned not with the day-to-day aspects of that work, not with tactics in meeting current situations, but rather with underlying needs and problems and with broad guiding principles for meeting them.

“On this committee will rest the responsibility for distilling out the crucial major goals of the community relations field, and of formulating the more or less constant motifs of the efforts of the field,” Mr. Kane said. “This process necessarily will involve an examination of the validity of the assumptions on which the whole present direction of community relations work rests, in the perspective of Jewish history and the dynamics of Jewish life, and in the light of the best established findings of modern social science.”