Dr. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, said last night that he is more optimistic over the possibility of peace in the Middle East than at any time since Israel achieved statehood 25 years ago. He told the Zionist-Organization of America’s Chicago Region at the Pick-Congress Hotel here that the main reason for this outlook is that the defeats suffered by the Arabs in 1948, 1956 and 1967, in addition to creating “a sense of humiliation and hatred for the Jewish State,” have also caused the Arabs to realize that “there is no chance in the forseeable future” to destroy Israel.
In addition, Dr. Goldmann cited the start of “a period of detente and coexistence between the big powers which has led to a more stable situation in the Far East and in Europe.” This phenomenon “must inevitably lead the super powers to want to stabilize the situation in the Middle East, which is the most unstable and explosive area in the world,” he said.
RELIGION MUST ADJUST TO 20TH CENTURY
Dr. Goldmann, who is also president of the Memorial Fund for Jewish Culture and the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, said peace with the Arabs is but one of several major unsolved problems with which Israel is confronted; the others, he said, are integration of the various Jewish cultures in Israel into “one people,” an improvement of relations between the State and the Jewish religion and the establishment of conditions that will enable a large and autonomous diaspora “to live as an equal part of the Jewish people together with the Jewish State.”
Improved relations between Israel and the Jewish religion, Dr. Goldmann said, rest primarily with the religious bodies who must “adjust Jewish religion to the 20th century and the existence of a Jewish State–without separating the two, which would be a negation of Jewish history.”
He said it “will require a great ingenuity, great creativity and a tremendous amount of good will and tolerance on all parts of the Jewish people, especially on the part of the Jewish Orthodoxy,” to fulfill this “difficult task.”
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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.
