Henry Cron, national president of Brith Sholom, a national fraternal organization, appealed to Mayor John V. Lindsay to rescind the executive order authorizing the survey undertaken by the Human Rights Commission on minority employes in city government. Cron, a Brooklyn lawyer, warned that the survey’s “implication that merit and qualifications be ignored to insure a quota-type representation” of minority groups would result in “ethnic and racial politics and demagoguery and further division among the citizens of New York.”
To insure that qualified personnel from all groups are represented, he strongly supported all efforts to provide equal education and training for all citizens and urged a campaign to acquaint the public with job openings in the city administration. Cron said, “Jews historically must be wary of any attempt to surrender the hard won concept of achievement by merit for a system of ethnic balance according to population.” He said that wherever anti-Semitism rose, one of the complaints has been “that there are too many Jews in this or that profession or business.”
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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.