Dr. Joseph P. Sternstein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, said here yesterday that he was “not for dismantling, disbanding or replacing the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.”
The ZOA head underscored his view that the Presidents Conference “must remain in existence” even as he expressed what he termed his “disappointment and disquietude with its general ineffectiveness compounded by Its recent failure to protest publicly against the one-sided and discriminatory U.S. pressures that forced Israel to accept the Egypt-Israel accord on Sinai.”
He said he is “convinced that the Presidents Conference can still prove itself to be an effective voice of the 32 presidents who represent the organized American Jewish community.”
What is needed to make the Conference effective is a “re-affirmation of the spirit of independence, the courage to be critical of friends in and out of government–the U.S. government and the Israel government–and the resolve and energy to mobilize the American public, and most certainly the great body of American Jewry in support and defense of Israel’s security as we see it from the vantage point of both the people of Israel and the whole Jewish people, Sternstein declared.
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.
