The 23rd World Zionist Congress registered a “new era,” in Zionism, the era of Israel, Dr. Israel Goldstein, president of the World Confederation of General Zionists, said here this week-end on his return from Israel.
He declared that the Congress had “faced up to the issue of unconditional co-operation with Israel” and had accepted it. The Congress, however, Dr. Goldstein declared, failed “to measure up to its mission, that of defining Zionism’s new aim for the new era.” He said, however, that this ideological failure was a safeguard of the organizational strength of Zionism.
Israelis have been made to understand, Dr. Goldstein asserted, that “new methods and new approaches must be found” to spur immigration by Jewish youth from Anglo-Saxon countries into Israel.
Failure of the Congress to adopt a Jerusalem program for the Zionist movement was assailed by Leo Wolfsohn, chairman of the American Zionist Revisionists, who blamed the failure on fears of antagonizing “anti-Zionists, non-Zionists and half-baked Zionists.” He charged that a deeper rift had been made in Zionist ranks through the “complete sidetracking” of Dr. Abba Hillel Silver from Zionist leadership and exclusion of the Revisionists from the new Zionist Executive.
Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, charged in a statement here that the decisions of the Congress constitute a program of “Jewish” nationalism and intervention in the lives and institutions of Jews in countries outside Israel. He asserted that a stable Jewish life in the United States would be come impossible if the Jerusalem decisions were allowed to materialize here.
(Dr. Nahum Goldmann, co-chairman of the Zionist Executive, was incorrectly quoted in a cable published in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency News Bulletin on Sept. 11. Dr. Goldmann, in commenting on the results of the Congress, said that he was glad that a large executive had been achieved with Dr. Emanuel Neumann and Berijamin G. Browdy representing the Zionist Organization of America, and that he regretted that Dr. Abba Hillel Silver was not a member of the Actions Committee.)
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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.
