Sen. Rudy Boschwitz (R. Minn.) stressed here that the strength of the Jewish lobby was not due to the representatives of the Jewish organizations in Washington but to the organized Jewish communities throughout the United States.
“It is the Jews of this country who are willing to to be involved who are really the strength of the Jewish lobby, not the few that I hear in Washington,” Boschwitz told the opening session of the United Jewish Appeal’s three-day National Leadership Conference at the Sheraton-Washington Hotel last Friday. The session was a joint plenary of the UJA and the Council of Jewish Federations honoring the 70th anniversary of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Robert Loup, outgoing UJA national chairman, presented Henry Taub, JDC president, with a plaque in which the “UJA expresses profound appreciation for the JDC’s seven decades of noble endeavor; the rescue, relief and rehabilitation of millions of Jews in more than 70 countries around the world.”
In turn, Taub presented Loup and CJF national president Martin Citrin each with one of a limited edition of a Passover seder plate originally made by Jews in the Foehrenwald displaced persons camp in April 1948 three weeks before the State of Israel was born. The plate carries the inscription, “This Year in Jerusalem.”
CITES ROLE OF THE JDC, OTHER GROUPS
Boschwitz, a former State chairman of the Minnesota UJA, noted that the JDC and other Jewish organizations helped him and his family when they escaped from Nazi Germany and sought entry into the United States. He said the Jewish community has to be organized, generous and willing to speak out because only a strong Jewish community, especially the United States, can help Jews wherever in the world they need help.
Boschwitz predicted that during the next seven years, Jews somewhere will need that help. “If we do not help ourselves, no one will help us,” he said. “That is the history of our people.”
At the dinner Friday night, the Israeli Ambassador, Meir Rosenne, said that he, too, was helped by the JDC when, at the age of 13, he and his family fled Rumania and came to what was then Palestine. He said that many of the persons who came then lived in tents but today are leaders of Israeli society.
The leadership conference marks a change in UJA leadership and the beginning of the 1985 campaign. Loup noted that contributions have always been high in times of crisis. He said the challenge now is for giving to be based on “pride not panic, on an awareness of ongoing accomplishments rather than, unfortunately, recurring emergencies.” (By David Friedman)
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