B’nai B’rith President Says Rabbis Must Do More for Jewish Education

The American rabbinate is not doing “all it needs to do” to help raise Jewish education “out of its infantile pit,” Label A. Katz, president of B’nai B’rith, said tonight. He urged that the needs of Jewish education “be treated with the same community-wide concern and support that is now given to overseas philanthropy, community relations, social service and other aspects of Jewish life.”

“The rabbinate dearly wants his,” Mr. Katz told the annual convention of the B’nai B’rith district here. “But it is working haphazardly and often at odds with itself to achieve it.” The consequence, he added, is a “melancholy level of cultural and religious illiteracy in Jewish life. It remains an ill-defined problem for ill-equipped congregations to cope with, when the need is for an organized push by the full strength of the Jewish community.”

The B’nai B’rith president addressed an audience of 2,000 at the opening session of the four-day convention. He commended “the zeal of most congregational rabbis in recognizing that their primary responsibility is to encourage a mature Jewish learning.” But, he said, such individual efforts are severely limited without the “realistic planning and concerted attention on a community rather than a congregational basis” of rabbinical and religious bodies.

“The high hopes for an increasingly creative Jewish community can be shattered unless there is an increasingly literate community,” Mr. Katz said. “But the education of the laity, its youth and adults, needs a greater degree of collective guidance and leadership by the rabbis and educators if the Jewish community is to be prodded into constructive action.”