American Jewish Conference Criticizes Groups Opposing Establishment of Jewish State

The American Jewish Conference today issued a statement charging the American Jewish Committee and the American Council for Judaism with obstructing the efforts of the majority of American Jewry towards a just solution of the Palestine problem,”

The specific charge against the American Jewish Committee says that when Judge Joseph Proskauer and Jacob Plaustein, leaders of the Committee, conferred with president Truman, they asked him to use his influence to obtain prompt and substantial increase in the number of certificates for Jewish immigration into Palestine, (##)tilized the occasion” also to advise the President that political questions relating to the future of Palestine should be put aside. “Since President Truman had already made his request to Prime Minister Attles for 100,000 immigration certificates, the intervention of the representatives of the American Jewish Committee, discover may have been their alleged intent, could only be interpreted as an effort to create the impression in the President’s mind that a segment of American Jewry was (##)sed to political action new with regard to Palestine,” the American Jewish Conference stated.

With regard to the American Council of Judaism, the statement charged Lessing (##)senwald, president of the Council, with making public in the press a statement in which he declared that an overwhelming body of American Jews oppose a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It also charges Rabbi Morris Lazaron of the Council with publishing in the N.Y. Times a two-column letter to the editor, timed to appear on the day of the Madison Square Garden protest meeting, in which he said that American Christians should know that Jews are divided on the Palestine issue and expressed the opinion that rather than indulge in mass-meetings and in “irritating public pressure,” it should be possible to mitigate the fears of the Arabs by international guarantee against “Jewish domination.”

“We do not question the right of minorities to express dissident opinions or propagate their views, “the American Jewish Conference states. “But we submit that these successive actions indicate a purpose and a plan to subvert the will of the majority of American Jewry at the critical time when a decision on Palestine appears iminent.”

Declaring that “the activities of minority fragments of Jewish groups were not only a disgraceful and humiliating spectacle,” the statement says that “the American Jewish Conference, therefore, protests and condemns the shocking conduct of these Jewish groups at a time when justice for the Jews hangs in the balance and when the lives of the survivors of European Jewry are at stake.”