Israel Premier David Ben-Gurion angrily rejected here a question posed to him by an American Orthodox rabbi about his attitude toward Kashrut. The question was asked during a lively discussion between members of the Rabbinical Council of America, which concluded its conference here today, and the Prime Minister.
Mr. Ben-Gurion termed the posing of this question to him an impertinence. “Chutzpah,” he said, adding that this was a personal matter. At the same time he stated that while he was a non-observant Jew, he favored the continued rabbinical control in Israel on questions of personal status until the bulk of the newly-arrived Sephardic Jews became integrated.
When he was challenged regarding allegations that religious Jews were being discriminated against in Israel, he shouted “Libel” and charged the Hatzofeh, daily newspaper published by the Religious Party, with distortions. The Hatzofeh, in an editorial today, paid tribute to Premier Ben-Gurion as the country’s leading political figure, but warned him against “assuming the mantle of setting the tone for the ethical values of the Jewish people.”
At the final session of the Rabbinical council of America convocation. Rabbi Israel Miller of New York, a vice-president, warned that any effort by Reform and Conservative Judaism to enter the Israeli religious scene would “not strike roots but will divide and serve as a divisive influence,” just as it had “plagued the American Jewish community.”
It was disclosed meanwhile, on another front of the struggle between Jewish religious sects in Israel, that work will be resumed tomorrow on a Reform synagogue in Jerusalem after two years of arbitration and court struggles. Dr. Nelson Glueck, president of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, said he hoped the synagogue would be come the first real “bridgehead” of Reform Judaism in Israel.
The Reform synagogue will be a small chapel with room only for 150 worshippers. It will be housed in a building also containing the American School of Oriental Research, with which Dr. Glueck, a noted archaeologist, has been associated for many years.
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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.
