Fifth Reform Rabbi Joins Urban Affairs Programs; All Will Spend 10 Weeks in Slums

Arrangements have been completed for a fifth Reform student rabbi to live and work in the slum of a major city this summer in the second year of the Rabbinic Internship in Urban Affairs program, Rabbi Balfour Brickner reported today. The project, first under Jewish religious sponsorship, is a program of the Commission on Interfaith Activities of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Central Conference of American Rabbis and the Jewish Chautauqua Society, the institutions of Reform Judaism. Rabbi Brickner is Commission director.

The five student rabbis and the cities in whose ghettoes they will live and work for 10 weeks, starting July l, are: Bruce Cohen of Buffalo, in Newark; Roger Klein of Cleveland, in St. Louis; Roger Alper of Baltimore in Washington, D.C.; Stanley Gerstein of Los Angeles, in Chicago; and Lawrence Lauer of Cleveland, in Milwaukee. All five are students at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Internships are sponsored locally by local Jewish community relations agencies or other groups. In Chicago, the internships are being sponsored by the UAHC Mitzvah Corps. The. St. Louis Federation of Reform Congregations is sponsor in that city.

The rabbinic intern agrees to live in the slum area for the 10-week period, Rabbi Brickner said. He works with Protestant and Catholic urban ministers to study first hand the problems of the urban poor, to provide help in anti-poverty programs, to examine white-Negro tensions, to evaluate the response of public and private agencies to inner city problems, and to study the attitudes of the local Jewish community toward the problems of the urban crisis. He also is expected to make proposals on action programs the Jewish community might undertake for the urban poor. His assignment includes weekly reports, which are sent to the local sponsoring agency, to the Commission and to the college.