Convention of Reform Rabbis Discusses Issue of U.S. Jewish “all-day Schools”

Pros and cons of the Jewish “all-day school” were presented here at a discussion before the Central Conference of American Rabbis which is now holding its 61st annual convention.

Speaking against the “all-day schools,” Dr. Victor Reichert of Cincinnati, said: “I see the Jewish all-day school as a phenomenon that must be interpreted in the context of the eclipse of humanistic liberalism and withdrawal into the shell of separatism. The all-day school seeks survival by voluntary withdrawal and segregation from the American public school–the best workshop we have to forge the tools for a more ideal America.”

Dr. Emanuel Gamoran, educational director of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, defending the idea of a Jewish all-day school in the United States, declared: “It is good American tradition to permit private secular schools and day school under religious auspices. Therefore, any opposition to their existence should be based on an objective consideration of the facts, rather than on any emotional reactions on the parts of Jews whose Judaism is so attenuated that they always, psychiatrically, consider anything Jewish as anti-American.”

The Conference reaffirmed its stand for separation of Church and State when it approved the following recommendations of its Church and State Committee: “1. Protest against the use of our public schools as places of Bible distribution; 2. Opposition to use of public tax money for direct or indirect support of parochial schools, Christian or Jewish; 3. Opposition to use of clergymen as official paid court officers; 4. Protest against the practice of seeing the support of town or city officials through governmental edicts or proclamation of a holy day that is not significant to the non-Christian public; and 5. Opposition to use of public buildings for display of strictly religious symbols of sectarian bodies.

CULTURAL RELATIONS BETWEEN AMERICAN JEWS AND ISRAEL DEFINED

The inner resources and spiritual vitality of the generation of Jewry which wrought the Jewish renaissance and the state of Israel are sadly lacking in many American Jewish circles today, Dr. Samuel M. Blumenfield of Chicago, noted Jewish educator, told the Conference at a symposium on “Israed and the American Jew.”

Rabbi Charles E. Shulman, of New York, in the same symposium, told the rabbis that American Reform Judaism suffers under peculiar handicaps with regard to Israel because of American Reform’s association with elements hostile to Zionist ideology. Dr. Abraham J. Feldman, of Hartford, Conn., was chairman of the symposium.

Dr. Blumenfield said that “it is certain that the question of cultural and spiritual ties between Israel and America will surpass in importance some of the immediate issues that command our attention today. Those of us who live in, work for and love America can speak with conviction that America is different. While no one after the nightmare of fascism could guarantee that ‘it cannot happen here,’ we maintain that should the evils of totalitarianism reach America, neither the Jews of Israel nor mankind itself would remain safe. In the light of the reality of the state of Israel and our present-day knowledge and experience of America, I submit that the cultural relations between Israel and American Jewries should be conceived in terms of a ‘two-way passage.”