The Jewish community in the United States and Canada is facing a period ahead that is fraught with uncertainties and challenges that will require “faith, commitment, courage and vision, ” to ensure “the safety and strength of the State of Israel and the creative continuity of the Jewish people,” Martin Citrin, president of the Council of Jewish Federations told some 3,000 delegates from the United States and Canada attending the 52nd General Assembly of the CJF.
In his keynote address here last night, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Citrin told the Jewish communal leaders that the theme of this assembly, “Coping With Change: Federations Confront the Challenges of an Uncertain Future,” reflect the year that is drawing to a close, a year “of crisis and confrontation for America, for Israel and for our Jewish people.”
Israel had to deal “with the consequences of its military power” and its confrontation with “the realities of its economic and political condition,” Citrin said. In addition, “Soviet Jewry was forced into deeper isolation — activists of anti-Semitism reared their ugly heads in western Europe, within the Eastern bloc and within Latin America.”
The United States “only recently suffered heartbreaking losses as a peace-keeper in Lebanon and in implementing its world responsibilities,” he observed. And within the United States, “we continue to be concerned that our government involvement with the human condition is diminished.”
ELEMENTS OF RELATIONSHIP WITH ISRAEL
In dealing with the interrelationship between North American Jewry and Israel, Citrin pointed out that “the future of the generations that follow us is extricably linked to Israel as a source of our deepening commitment to our sense of Jewishness and spiritual identification.
“Israel will increasingly become an operational source through which we crystallize and catalize our heritage of Judaism for ourselves and transmit that heritage to our children.”
As a concrete example of this, Citrin noted the need to become more intimately and more directly involved with the Jewish Agency “to promote our joint goals and objectives.” This, he emphasized, “points to increasing involvement of our Federations, who seek to participate in facilitating aliya for those constituents who want a new life in Eretz Israel, and for seeking strengthened and more effective linkage with Israel as a central resource for Jewish education.”
However, he stressed, “for all that Israel is and will be in our lives — it is not and cannot be a substitute for our own increased commitments to creative Jewish continuity at all levels in our communities. Our ability to use Israel, in the best sense of the term, will be related to what we can do for ourselves and with ourselves in Jewish education and in our own home environments.”
Dealing with what he termed “a Jewish communal partnership of concern with Jews of oppression,” Citrin said, to sustained applause, that Soviet Jewry “has been uppermost” on the agenda of the CJF.
He recalled that the CJF was well represented at Brussels III Conference last spring in Jerusalem when, “with Jews and non-Jews from all parts of the world, we called upon the Soviet government to open its gates and open its hearts to let our people go. We must never relax — indeed, we must intensify our efforts to keep this tragic situation central and up front on the world’s humanitarian agenda of our own and other governments.”
The “partnership of concern” also involved efforts on behalf of the Jews of Ethiopia. “We must state categorically and emphatically that we are proud of the efforts of Israel and the Jewish Agency to bring to Israel in 1983 the largest number of Ethiopian Jews ever to arrive in one year and, this, at huge sacrifice and risk in human terms, including physical danger,” Citrin declared, but without disclosing the number.
PROBLEMS OF JEWISH ‘MOBILITY’ IN U.S.
Focussing on the American scene, Citrin dealt with the problem that he said has become one of “increasing concern” over the last 20 years: “the mobility of Jewish America.” He pointed out that just as North America is on the move, so is Jewish America, “even more so. Significant portions of our people will not reside as adults in communities where they were born. In fact, in the quest for livelihood, professional growth, career or personal achievement, many will have moved once, twice, three times and even more.”
Continuing with this theme, Citrin noted that “mobility and ‘continental citizenship’ has obvious advantages but a price is paid in rootlessness and defection. I am talking about our rootedness with families, with friends and familiar surroundings — rootedness in a Jewish lifestyle and at-homeness, which we tend to take for granted.”
He warned that unless Jews on the move are sought out, welcomed and made to feel comfortable and can have ready access to Jewish life in their new communities, “they will be prone to drop out,” To avoid this, Citrin said the Federations must convey to Jews on the move that “the Jewish community cares about them and their well-being and offers them access to Jewish institutional life, to the synagogue, to the Jewish school, to the Jewish community centers” and to all other available services.
Mayor Andrew Young of Atlanta who was greeted both at the beginning and at the end of his brief welcome address to the delegates with sustained applause, praised the work of the Atlanta Federation in playing a vital role in dealing with and helping to accelerate whatever chances exist in the city between the Black and Jewish communities.
WIESEL ANALYZES JEWISH CONDITION
Elie Wiesel, author lecturer and chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, delivered a moving and frequently poetic analysis of the Jewish condition in the world. He pointed out that, “we live in an age of fear, of quasi-despair.” He said the world faces the danger of extinction, “but as a Jew, I am optimistic. What can the world do that it hasn’t already done to us?”
He stated that Jews can contribute to prevent a global disaster and to provide guidance toward peace because “we have a secret; that secret is our memory” of what has happened before. But that memory carries with it a responsibility to transmit it as a guide toward a sane world. And this, he said, in turn, requires a deepening of Jewishness, otherwise that memory becomes lost. The continuity and transmission of this memory is in essence what the CJF General Assemblies are all about, Wiesel declared.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
