Teen-age delegates to the B’rai B’rith Youth Organization’s annual conventions of Aleph Zadik Aleph and B’nai B’rith Girls were told here today that Jewish heritage demands “Jews be in the forefront of the current civil rights struggle in America.” Rabbi Stanley Rabinowitz, of Washington, told the more than 400 delegates attending the joint opening sessions of the two organizational conventions that being Jewish “means being sensitive to the problems of others.” He said the plight of the American Negro “is one the most pressing social problems of our day.”
But he emphasized that compassion for others is only one aspect of Judaism’s tradition. He condemned those who “forsake another important aspect of being Jewish, the struggle for the survival of our people, on the pretext of being too involved with fighting injustice. Fighting injustice is fine,” he said, “but those of us who live in two cultures must be true to the best of both. The time has long since passed when young people have sought to find their fulfillment by helping others, and evading their other responsibilities as Jews, or by masquerading their identity as Jews.”
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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.
