Detroit Allied Jewish Campaign Stresses Need for Community Center to Combat Growth of Gangs Among Yo

For the first time in the life of the Detroit Jewish community, the nearest approach to complete unity among all groups, regardless of synagogue or economic differences, is to be marked in the Allied Jewish Campaign for $305,000, which is to be conducted from May 11 to 21. Of this sum, $100,000 is to go to the national ###6,000,000 Fund of the Jewish Agency and the Joint Distribution Committee. Another $10,000 is to be used for the purchase of a site and for planning for ### Jewish Center. The United Hebrew Schools are to receive $50,000, and the balance is to be divided between numerous other local and national needs.

While nationally the Allied Jewish Campaign will plead for funds on the strength of the necessity for the continuation of relief work in Eastern Europe and for the reconstruction of Palestine, in Detroit, the appeal will center on the need for a Jewish Center. And so strong is sentiment in favor of filling this much-felt need of a home for youth and cultural activities, that before the campaign for $305,000, the largest sum ever asked here for one year, opens, it is expected that many Jews who were until now classed as assimilationists, and who have never before contributed to Jewish causes, will be in the lead both as donors and workers.

The one problem which more than any other accounts for such popularity of the Community Center idea is the notoriety that has been given in the past year to a gang composed almost entirely of Jews, which has been operating in and near Detroit, its members being involved in rum running, kidnapping, several murders and other criminal acts. The streamers devoted in the press to the activities of this gang, the manner in which court panels were monopolized by these delinquents, many of whom are 17 and 18 years old, the way the Jewish names screamed at readers daily from front pages, have humiliated the Jewish community.

Many of the Jewish leaders, in their anxiety to give to Detroit a modern community house for youth activities, are now linking the lack of such center facilities with the growth of gangsterism and the estrangement of young Jews from Jewish interests. Communal leaders are now addressing themselves to Detroit Jews and are telling them to provide modern quarters for youth work in order that a Jewish environment be created for the hundreds of boys who are otherwise drawn to the pool rooms, and that such social quarters be created that will attract the Jews girls to Jewish functions instead ### in quest of sociability ### ### direct the coming drive, did not mince words on this subject when he addressed himself to the annual meeting of the Federation and declared in his message that the need of a Center is one of Detroit’s major responsibilities. He, too, linked the lack of a community house with gangsterism when he said, "It is not too fantastic to associate the Purple Gang with the inadequacy of our Center facilities."

At present an old dilapidated church building is serving as a home for the Jewish Center, at 31 Melbourne Avenue, and on Fenkell Avenue, one of the thickly populated Jewish districts, a large store is used for a branch of the Center. It is planned by local leaders, after a site has been purchased and plans made for a Center with the initial sum of $100,000, to direct their energies towards raising another quarter of a million for an adequate modern building to fill Detroit’s needs.

Thus the cry of the leaders for a Center is overshadowing the European relief and Palestine reconstruction appeals.