Jews in North America and in Israel, in their own ways, and along parallel lines, are rising to the challenge of new agendas for the improvement of life and for meeting new realities. This was the theme of a major address by Irwin S. Field, United Jewish Appeal national chairman, to the 47th General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations.
Speaking to some 3000 Jewish leaders from the United States and Canada, Field focused on “Project Renewal, ” which he termed “the most visionary program world Jewry has ever undertaken.” What is at stake, he observed, is the quality of life for 300,000 people in Israel–200,000 of them children. It is a program geared to “the future of the next generation, the flowering of Israel’s youth, “he declared. The challenge of “Project Renewal” is “to match human and capital resources, giving people a sense that they can shape their own lives when they can contribute to society to the maximum of their creative ability,” Field said.
In a dramatic survey of the urban problems “Project Renewal” seeks to cope with, Field described conditions of children living four, five and six in a room, with no place to study or play. He said those who have witnessed first hand the situation in poverty neighborhoods in Israel, whether on the UJA’s Prime Minister Missions or American Jewish community missions, “understood immediately that this was a project about children and their parents–proud, dignified, hard-working second-generation immigrant families.” This, he added, was a project “about a new generation which once again dares to dream the dreams of the future.”
That is why, he observed, Project Renewal will be planned by the people living in the neighborhoods and the Jewish Agency, as well as the government and the municipalities. The program will coordinate capital improvements with the social infra-structure, including community centers, youth clubs, pre-kindergarten and all types of facilities, he said. “Visionary? Impractical? No more preposterous than what happened 30 years ago when Israel was founded, “Field declared.”What we must do now is to avoid the expediency of the past. There must be permanency to the program. It must be a coordinated effort to build a new reality for these people.”
NEW AGENDAS FOR AMERICAN JEWS
The challenge for North American Jewry is equally exciting in the context of changing realities in the last generation. The changes, Field noted, are in that the Jews have moved from an immigrant background living as a close-knit central city urban group to suburbanites of looser alliances; from one of the youngest immigrant groups to an expanded elderly population; from being oriented to an erosion of that strength. “A generation ago, we were almost completely youth oriented in our programs and outlooks, “Field said.”Today our attention must increasingly turn to the quality of life and the physical everyday life of our elderly population. A generation ago we reacted to the fact that our nation’s universities had quotas, so we had to fight to get our kids into colleges. Today we reach out to the nation’s campuses to assure the Jewish content of the curricula. A generation ago, no one could ever dream that an ember of spark was burning inside our people in the Soviet Union. A generation ago, who would have ever dreamed of street demonstrations and rallies on behalf of Soviet Jewry? Today, we must constantly do what is necessary to assist these courageous modern day Maccabees–to help them reach freedom–and to make them part of the community at home and in Israel.”
Field, in presenting the new agendas and the challenges to implement them, placed them in the framework of a historic event that marked the beginning of a nightmare that enveloped the world: Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass in Germany exactly 40 years ago. He drew on that infamous event to show how the American Jewish community responded to a threat to its brethren abroad by joining together all its resources to create a single unifying fund-raising force for American Jewry, the UJA, and how, after the war, the Joint Distribution Committee and other American Jewish organizations helped in the relief and rehabilitation for those who survived in the DP camps, and shortly after that the building of the State of Israel. Just as the Jewish people met these challenges and surmounted the obstacles before, so must the Jewish people tackle the new problems facing them, Field observed. Foremost among the new challenges and opportunities is to raise the necessary funds to implement the new agendas for Israel and North America.
He reported that $53 million has so far been pledged for the regular UJA national 1979 campaign–a 20 percent increase over last year–and from the same contributors an additional $27 million for Project Renewal. Calling on the assembled leaders to “go home with a commitment to participate in this campaign, ” and to reach out to the “unaffiliated and the unattached,” Field declared: “It is only through this kind of renewed, audacious campaign approach that we will meet the challenge of Jewish renewal at home and Project Renewal in Israel.”
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