The Jewish Education Committee warned the New York City Board of Education that one of the Board’s plans for integration of public schools “poses a grave threat to the survival of our system of Jewish religious education.”
The warning was contained in a letter to the Board signed by Jules L. Freed, president, and Dr. Azriel Eisenberg, executive vice-president, of the JEC. The plan to which the JEC referred involves Board of Education intentions to pair schools in marginal ethnic and racial neighborhoods which would involve bussing the affected children to the paired schools.
The JEC explained that a large proportion of Jewish children of grade school age and a growing number of children in junior and senior public high schools were receiving their religious education in afternoon Jewish schools three to four days a week. In this way, the JEC said, the children devoted the largest portion of their free time during daylight hours on week-days to instruction in the principles, traditions and classic materials of Judaism and thus “fortify and supplement the spiritual and moral values stressed in the public schools.”
Pointing out that nearly 50,000 children attend religious classes in nearly 500 Jewish schools usually operated between 3:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. the JEC declared: “The proposed changes will impose hardships on our children, fatigue and seriously impair the Jewish religious educational program that we have painstakingly established. The proposal to impose on the children’s time in getting to and from public schools poses a grave threat to the survival of our system of Jewish religious education. The loss to the children would be enormous.”
The JEC officials emphasized that they were in favor of public school integration in principle but added that in any changes for that goal “school attendance should be planned so that it does not infringe upon the limited time and energy that our children have available for study of the religious beliefs, ethical precepts and cultural heritage of our people.”
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.
