N.Y. Aj Committee Seeking to Ease Negro-jewish Tensions Stemming from School Strike

A spokesman for the New York chapter of the American Jewish Committee said today that chapter representatives had been engaged in intensive conversations with Jewish and Negro leaders in an effort to ease the Negro-Jewish tensions developing from the teachers strike against the city’s schools. The spokesman said the conversations had been going on for several weeks and that there was general agreement in both groups that the situation was serious and that action was essential to avoid a severe Negro-Jewish confrontation. He said that the chapter was planning to sponsor an advertisement in the New York press, to be signed by a wide representation of Negro and Jewish leadership, the theme of which will be a “call to reason” to all parties in the dispute. The New York City school system has been shut down three times since the opening of the school year, amid charges that black extremists were using anti-Semitism in their battle against the United Federation of Teachers.

At the same time, Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum, an AJ Committee official who is president of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, said in a radio interview that “we have begun a series of conversations with black religious and educational personalities focusing on the problems of working out an effective decentralization program, the resolution of which must concern all serious people who have the best interests of the children of our city at heart, as well as the legitimate interests of the teachers, and the black and Jewish peoples of this city.”

Rabbi Tanenbaum, who is director of interreligious affairs for the AJ Committee, said also that during the past week he had spoken with teachers and several Negro churchmen and community leaders in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville area, the controversial experimental section in decentralization, which has been the focus of the teachers union strike struggle. Rabbi Tanenbaum said those Negro leaders and teachers were “deeply disturbed” by the “prevalence of anti-Semitism and the role of black extremists from outside the community “and by “the polarization which this has led to between the black and Jewish communities.”