A call to Jewish unity was issued tonight by Rabbi Max Routtenberg, vice-president of the Rabbinical Assembly, speaking to his colleagues at the 64th annual convention of the international Conservative rabbinic body. “Crisis unity,” Rabbi Routtenberg stated, is a familiar phenomenon in the Jewish community. “We can be counted on to close ranks to create a united front, to engage in joint action against the common foe.” But, he continued, the unity which we must seek today is “another kind of unity, the unity of a people living in peace and freedom, and without any serious external threat to its existence.”
“Our crisis is the threat not of physical destruction but of spiritual and cultural extinction,” he said. “It is the crisis that the author of a lead article in this week’s issue of Look magazine, called ‘The Vanishing American Jew.” In this open hospitable American society, if we are to survive as Jews, we shall have to counteract the process of acculturation in the Great American Melting Pot. We shall meet the crisis of freedom as effectively as we have met the crisis of the oppression.” Characterizing American Jewry as strongly survivalist, he said, “no one can measure the force and the extent of our will to live.”
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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.
