The American Jewish Congress will mark its golden Jubilee here Dec. 14-15 exactly 50 years to the day since it was founded in this city as an organization to protect Jewish rights and to further the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. The keynote address will be delivered by Rabbi Arthur J, Lelyveld of Cleveland, president of the AJ Congress, the seventh person to hold that office. Rabbi Lelyveld will present citations to two men who are the last survivors of the AJ Congress’ original group of founders: Dr. Horace M. Kallen, professor emeritus of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, and Bernard G. Richards, director of the Jewish Information Bureau in New York.
The AJ Congress was founded in Philadelphia in 1918 to seek guarantees in the Versailles Treaty of the civil and legal rights of Jews and other minorities in states carved out of the defeated German and Austro-Hungarian empires and to win the peace conference’s endorsement of the Balfour Declaration. It met again in Philadelphia in 1920 and constituted itself as a permanent organization for the protection of Jewish and other minority rights.
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.
