Assimilation in U.S. Jewry Decried at Convention of Religious Zionists

Rabbi Mordecai Kirshblum, president of the Religious Zionists of America, today opened the 55th annual convention of the organization by “decrying the serious inroads of assimilation in all streams of American-Jewish life.” He stressed that “the survival of a vibrant and enduring Judaism is greatly menaced by the ever-growing assimilatory trends which characterize the mainsprings of the Jewish community in the United States.” He spoke before an assemblage of over 800 delegates and observers from every part of the United States.

“Assimilatory dangers may be found among such groupings as the intellectuals, college students, youth leaders and followers, and a wide variety of Jews in general,” he said, “Assimilation den tes a fatal and destructive abandonment of those traditional Jewish values which have always knitted the Jewish collectivity into a viable, functioning and creative unit for service, achievement and human progress.”

Rabbi Kirshblum pointed cut that “a sound approach to counteract and arrest this corrosive development of assimilation is to stress and bolster Jewish religious education on the highest levels.” The leaders of American Jewry and religious Zionism, he declared, must undertake a vigorous program of educational expansion, so that all-day schools will become a common and accepted pattern of instruction for the built of Jewish youth in the United States. He appealed to “the leaders of the Jewish welfare funds of the United States, who are currently holding their conclave in St. Louis, to assume the full financial burden of covering the heavy and ever-increasing costs of operating these all-day schools.

“While these welfare funds support very worthwhile institutions in Jewish life such as hospitals, youth centers, and old-age homes, they have been neglectful of and indifferent to giving aid to a facet of communal endeavor embodied in the all-day school movement which is most essential for the continuance of a dynamic and surging Jewish community in the United States. If the welfare fund leaders continue to maintain an attitude of aloofness an apathy to the financial problems which confront the all-day schools, the Religious Zionists will be compelled against their better judgment to seek federal assistance and grants for parochial schools in Washington,” he declared.