Plans for a training program for teachers in church schools in the Sarasota area, to improve their teaching about Jews and Judaism, were approved at a two-day “Faith Without Prejudice” conference here, Rabbi A. Janes Rudin, director of Interreligious Affairs of the American Jewish Committee, reported today.
Rudin said the conference, which ended last Friday, attracted a “record attendance” of more than 600 participants, most of them Christians.
He said the projected teacher training program, for both Protestant and Catholic schools, will be organized at a meeting, probably in January, “hopefully” to begin next September. He said the AJCommittee will be one of the plan’s sponsors and that another sponsor will be the Sarasota Ministerial Association.
‘LIFELINE LETTERS’ CAMPAIGN ANNOUNCED
Rudin reported also that those at the conference agreed to participate in “Lifeline Letters,” a campaign to enlist commitments for writing letters, sending holiday cards and other indications of support to Soviet Jewish refuseniks. Lifeline Letters is a project of Operation Lifeline, which is sponsored by the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry and the AJCommittee.
During the two-day conference, two major local dailies, the St. Petersburg Independent and the Tampa Tribune, reporting on the conference, published the names of 150 refuseniks, most of them Jews but including some Christians persecuted by Soviet officials.
Speakers at the conference included Rudin; Father John Pawlikowski, professor of social ethics at the Catholic Theological Union of the University of Chicago; and Dr. David Taylor of Orange Park, Fla., a long-time leader in the National and World Council of Churches.
THE MOST CRUCIAL BATTLEGROUND
Rudin said that “perhaps the most crucial battleground in the war against religious prejudice is the classroom. Anti-Semitism, racism and bigotry have no place in our teaching materials and school curriculums.” He described the work of the AJCommittee in persuading Christian educators to eliminate anti-Jewish materials from their textbooks and teaching programs.
Pawlikowski expressed satisfaction that “many of the traditional stereotypes of Jews and Christians have disappeared in recent decades” but he warned that “a potential remains for continued distortion.”
Taylor told the conference that “our respective religious commitments have tended to lead us at times to social and political courses of action that set our faith communities at odds with one another,” adding that “maintaining ‘faith without prejudice’ is crucial, both for our religious self-identity for our common life in society.”
The conference was sponsored by the Sarasota Ministerial Association, the Sarasota Jewish Federation Community Relations Council and the AJCommittee.
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.
