B’nai B’rith Urges UN to Adopt Acceptable Definition of Aggression

The B’nai B’rith urged the United Nations today to reach agreement on an “authoritative standard” for determining acts of aggression. The appeal from the national Jewish service organization was contained in a letter to UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim from B’nai B’rith president David M. Blumberg. The move disclosed by Blumberg at the annual meeting of the organization’s board of governors, its top policy-making body.

The letter to Waldheim accompanied copies of a new study by Benjamin B. Ferencz, a former counsel at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, which criticized the UN’s failure to achieve an acceptable definition of aggression. Blumberg said in his letter to Waldheim that a “clear cut” definition would make the peace-keeping machinery of the UN more credible. The lack of definition, he contended, is a “major stumbling block” to the adoption of an international code of offenses against the peace and the establishment of an international criminal court.

STUDY OF ELDERLY, JEWISH FAMILY

In another area of B’nai B’rith concern Blumberg announced that the problem of the Jewish aged and the entire scope of Jewish family problems would be explored at a B’nai B’rith sponsored national conference on April 1 involving Jewish sociologists, educators and theologians to be held at the University of Maryland.

He said the object of the conference would be to assist Jews who are over 66 years of age, poor and live alone or with non-relatives. Blumberg said that while the B’nai B’rith will continue its extensive youth programs, it deplored the national trend which “has made America so youth conscious that the media and our mode of life neglects those who have achieved experience and few wrinkles.”