The present generation of Jewish adults in this country, native and college-educated, is “increasingly reachable” for involvement in study programs of Judaism and Jewish life, it was established at the two-day national B’nai B’rith conference on adult Jewish education which concluded its sessions here yesterday. More than 200 participants, including representatives of Jewish religious and secular groups, attended the parley.
However, it was also emphasized at the conference that the “lack of cohesion” in Jewish-educational activity is limiting the opportunities for “mature learning on a community-wide level.” Speakers pointed out that Jewish community life is “over-institutionalized” and weakened by competitive organizational loyalties, and that it fails to pool and focus its educational resources on developing a more creative contemporary Jewish culture.
The conference, planned several months ago, became a memorial tribute to its originator — the late Rabbi Morris Adler of Detroit who, shot by a demented youth, died Friday morning after lingering in a coma for 27 days. An outstanding scholar and the retiring chairman of B’nai B’rith’s adult education commission, Rabbi Adler was to have been a major speaker at the conference. The commission curtailed its business sessions except to act unanimously on a recommendation that had been presented by Rabbi Adler for the election of Dr. Harold Weisberg, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis University, as commission chairman.
Dr. Weisberg, a conference speaker, deplored the tendency of American Jewry to express its Jewishness through an “organizational culture” in which a dominant loyalty to the institution substitutes for a culture that requires “no underpinning of ideology, no conscious campaigns for continuity, no organized program for survival. ” The tole of the American Jewish community, he said, should be that of “a creative minority in a pluralistic America rather than a minority conforming culturally to the democratic majority.”
Other speakers included Dr. Manheim Shapiro, director of Jewish-cultural affairs for the American Jewish Committee; Rabbi Jay Kaufman, executive vice-president of B’nai B’rith; Dr. Ira Eisenstein, president of the Reconstructionist Foundation; and Prof. Seymour Siegel of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
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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.
