A call to delegates at the second annual meeting of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture “to look toward its future with the breadth of vision that would make it a dynamic force in raising Jewish life to a new level of cultural creativity” was voiced today by Dr. Nahum Goldmann, who was reelected chairman of the Foundation.
He told the representatives of 41 Jewish organizations from all continents that he conceived the task of the Memorial Foundation to be that of serving as an essential instrument working for the survival of Jewish life.
“The threat of Jewish survival today is not annihilation from without but disintegration from within,” he declared. “Against such disintegration the Foundation should stand as a mighty bulwark.”
The Foundation was established in 1965 by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany with residual funds from the Claims Conference, to serve as a living memorial to the 6,000,000 European Jews slaughtered by the Nazis. It operates in three main areas: Education, with emphasis on training teachers, rabbis and Jewish scholars; research and publication; and commemoration and documentation of the period of the catastrophe.
The Foundation operates with a capital of more than $10,000,000 from which it spends the income supplemented by annual grants from individuals and other foundations. In its first year, the Foundation made grants totalling more than $850,000. At the meeting today, grants amounting to $1,140,500 were voted to 200 individuals and institutions.
Dr. Goldmann also said that as presently constituted, the Foundation was “the most representative and comprehensive body in Jewish life,” representing through its 41 member organizations, every shade of ideological opinion and every geographical area. He said that “to maintain this large and complicated structure just for the purpose of parcelling out $1,000,000 a year to 200 or 300 institutions or individuals would be a real waste of its potential strength.”
GOLDMANN PROPOSES SET OF PRIORITIES FOR FOUNDATION’S PROGRAM
Dr. Goldmann proposed a set of priorities to enable the Foundation to realize its goal as an instrument of Jewish survival. One would be to develop a worldwide corps of highly-qualified teachers for all levels of Jewish education which now suffers from “anemia” caused by lack of good teachers.
The second priority, he said, should be to train and provide facilities for young Jewish scholars that would attract young intellectuals into Jewish scholarship. He said this goal would involve greater cooperation with Harvard University, the Sorbonne and the University of London where the Foundation took the solid step of creating chairs of Judaica.
His third priority called for establishing “monumental” cultural enterprises to express the inheritance of the Jewish people, with special emphasis on the cultural contributions of those individuals and centers of Jewish learning who were annihilated by the Nazis.
He said such priorities would not preclude the Foundation’s continued support of programs of commemoration and documentation of the holocaust. He expressed the conviction that if the Foundation assumed the functions appropriate to an agency of its scope and authority, it should be able to increase its budget to $3,000,000 in the space of a few years. As possible sources of new funds, Dr. Goldmann cited private foundations, universities and even additional money from the West German Government.
A breakdown of the grants for the 1966-67 academic year approved today by the delegates indicated that 30 percent went for educational programs, mostly for rabbinical seminars and teacher-training colleges but also including establishment of chairs in Judaica at universities; 30 percent went for documentation and commemoration of the Nazi holocaust; and 40 percent for research publication and fellowship. Grants went to individuals in Israel and the United States, and in eight European countries, Australia and Uruguay.
The delegates approved appointment of a committee to consider the proposals made by Dr. Goldmann and to turn them over to working scholars and experts in various fields to draw up projects to be submitted to the next annual Foundation meeting.
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.
