An enthusiastic overflow crowd of 7000 attended a Twin-City rally yesterday held at St. Thomas College, a Catholic school in St. Paul, to protest against the United Nations General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism. Bayard Rustin, chairman of Black Americans to Support Israel Committee, and Senators Hubert H. Humphrey and Walter Mondale, both Minnesota Democrats, were featured speakers at the interfaith event.
Other speakers included Gov. Wendell Anderson, Rep. Donald Fraser (D. Minn.), who is the Congressional representative to the UN; Msgr. Jerome Quinn, representing the Archbishop of Minneapolis-St. Paul; the Rev. Canon George Lemoine of the Minnesota Council of Churches, and Rabbis Arnold Goodman of Minneapolis and Bernard Raskas of St. Paul, who were also co-chairmen of the rally. The program also included a message of support from President Ford.
Speakers stressed the need for Americans of all faiths to ban together against the bigotry and anti-Semitism implied in the UN resolution and actively support the State of Israel. Humphrey saw the resolution as an “open violation of the United Nations Charter” and said “it sows the seeds of religious bigotry, and will inevitably take its toll on America’s willingness to walk the extra mile for the UN.”
The rally was sponsored jointly by Jewish Community Relations Council-Anti-Defamation League of Minnesota and the Dakotas, the Minneapolis Federation for Jewish Service, the St. Paul United Fund and Council, the Minnesota Rabbinical Association, and the NAACP.
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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.
