B’nai B’rith President Calls for Intensified Adult Jewish Education

The American Jewish community, which spends about $60,000,000 annually on formalized Jewish education for its youth “will get more value for each dollar and more dollars to meet rising educational needs when there is a better-informed adult generation intellectually sensitive to these needs, ” Label A. Katz, president of the B’nai B’rith, asserted last night.

For this reason, he said at a symposium sponsored here by the B’nai B’rith Commission on Adult Jewish Education, intensive programs of adult study were a “critical essential” for speeding up the progress and the quality of Jewish education in the United States. Stressing that Jewish education “must mature beyond a childhood experience, ” Mr. Katz urged “some lively experimentation with teaching methods and group study for the fellow past 40. ” He warned against Jewish community attitudes which “relegate adult Jewish education to a marginal status.

“When Jewish education is neglected, the entire content of Judaism is reduced to merely an awareness, of anti-Semitism, ” he said. “Judaism then ceases to be a civilization. It becomes a psychological complex. “

He called the “tremendous advances” in youth enrollments for all-day, afternoon and Sunday schools, up more than 125 percent during the past decade, an “encouraging demonstration of reawakened parental interest” in Jewish schooling. But he deplored “the concomitant tendency of Jewish adults to satisfy their own educational deficiencies by transferring the responsibility to their children. “

Maurice A. Weinstein, acting chairman of the commission, described plans for B’nai B’rith’s expanded program of adult Jewish education. B’nai B’rith, at its 1959 convention, set up a $300, 000 fund for this program.