The Synagogue Council of America today called on Christians and Jews to be prepared with firm leadership if the “sickness” of the current world-wide spate of anti-Semitic incidents should continue.
A spokesman for the Synagogue Council, the national central agency for the congregational and rabbinical organizations of Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews, said the smearing of synagogues and churches “may well be the work of pranksters with a diseased sense of humor.”
Warning against alarmist and exaggerated Judgments about the incidents, the spokesman for the Synagogue Council added that “at the same time the possible gravity of this sudden chain of desecration ought not to be minimized.”
Recalling that the “pranks” of the early Hitler and Mussolini periods were dismissed as the “antics of a lunatic fringe,” the spokesman said that those events “should have taught us that no public phenomenon of this sort can be permitted to escape our unrelenting vigilance. Both Christians and Jews–who have a common history and fate in this experience–must watch these diabolical episodes with open eyes and be prepared for firm leadership should, God forbid, this sickness begin to spread.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
