Creation of ‘jewish Elite’ Advocated at J.w.b. Jubilee Convention

Creation of a “Jewish elite” is essential is Jewish life is to be preserved in the United States, a Columbia University historian told the opening scission here today of the Golden Jubilee convention of the National Jewish Welfare Board.

Prof. Gershon D, Cohen told the 800 delegates that there would be “tremendous losses” to the American Jewish community, including Jewish men and women “of great talent,” through intermarriage and self-alienation. Those who remain, he added, “will look to deeply committed leaders to provide guidance and purposive direction.” For these reasons, he asserted, “we must provide a Jewish elite that will be able to formulate, interpret and transmit the type or types of Jewish life we want to see preserved, developed, bequeathed.”

Denying any implication that he was advocating a return to the ghetto for American Jewry, Dr. Cohen added that “the time is past when we must be so indistinguishable as Jews as to hide our Jewishness.”

Louis Stern, JWB president, discussed the impact of expanding government financing of welfare services on private philanthropy. Predicting that welfare agencies will seek to be the agents through which such funds are channeled, “rather than surrender areas of work,” he said the leadership in that struggle is more likely to come from the Catholic community, rather than “primarily and exclusively from Jewish sources.”

He also predicted that Jewish-supported hospitals, casework agencies and vocational services could reestablish their “validity in the Jewish scheme of things” by changing their emphases. He said “the emphasis will shift to Christian-Jewish relationships, Negro-Jewish relationships and problems resulting from school desegregation, housing and equal opportunity legislation” in the field of Jewish community relations work.

JEWISH VALUES REPORTED BECOMING OF ‘LESS RELEVANCE’ TO YOUTH

Jewish community centers, Jewish educational agencies and the synagogues “will have major responsibilities in developing attitudes, activities and programs that will help men, women and children find significance in being Jews in America,” Mr. Stern said.

Bertram H. Gold, executive director of the Jewish Centers Association of Los Angeles, pictured the American Jewish young person as viewing himself “living in a bomb-clouded world which appears more and more absurd to him.” For such youth, Jewish life and Jewish values have “increasingly less relevance” and, without help, the young Jew falls “away from the group.”

The “compelling articulate authority” which Jewish youth is desperately seeking “has not as yet been found, “the Los Angeles Center executive said. “With God dead, current religious authority seems to offer little. Jewish cultural and art forms are either quaint or made so much a part of the mainstream of American cultural life that they lose their Jewish uniqueness.” He contended that the organized Jewish community also failed to provide for an identification and for living with Jewishness for Jewish youth “through their primary group associations and through their own inner life cycle.”

PRESIDENT JOHNSON LAUDS NATIONAL JEWISH WELFARE BOARD

In a message to the convention, President Johnson said that the JWB’s 50 years of “exceptional public service” had earned it “the admiration of a grateful country.” “Through your many affiliated YM and YWHAs and Jewish Community Centers, you have helped people of all ages achieve creative fulfillment through the constructive use of leisure time. You have successfully administered to the needs of Jewish military personnel, hospitalized veterans and their families,” the President declared.

“Your expanding program of public affairs, your concern to prepare our youth for responsible citizenship and your commitment to human dignity vividly reflect your dedication to the kind of society for which we are all striving,” the President continued. “By enhancing the quality of Jewish life in America, you contribute to the general progress and vitality of this nation. I am happy to extend my congratulations upon your Golden Anniversary of conspicuous accomplishments.”