Denouncing the “drift toward secularism” as “the most formidable challenge to the synagogue today”Louis J. Moss, national president of the United Synagogue of America, today told 1,000 delegates to the 1940 national convention that unless this challenge is met and beaten back “we fail in our great purpose to make religion a directive force in life”.
Religion “is the supreme guide for human conduct”and ” the basis for democratic development,” he said, and so long as”these stand, dictators cannot completely subjugate minds of men to their purpose.”
Dr. Robert W. Searle, general secretary of the Greater New York Federation of Churches, declared at the convention banquet tonight: “At this moment our attention is being forcibly attracted to terrible events which are transpiring on continent of Europe. It is natural that it should be so, but it will be tragic if we allow ourselves to believe that major threat to our democratic way of living lies over there. I am firmly convinced America’s important mission to the world lies not in participation in war but in first making its democratic way of life as attractive as it possibly can be made and at same time gathering its energies for tasks of mercy and of reconstruction.”
Plans for a national program to expand and coordinate Jewish religious education in the United States and Canada were presented last night at the formal opening of the joint convention of the group together with its Women’s League and the National Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs.
Mapped by the Joint Commission on Jewish Education, which consists of the United Synagogue and the Rabbinical Assembly of America, and presented to the convention by Rabbi Alter F. Landesman, chairman of the Joint Commission, the program would provide for “assistance to American Jewish congregations and their individual congregational schools by furnishing them with educational supervision and materials which only a national organization can produce and distribute.”
“The trend in recent years in Jewish educational activity in this country, ” Rabbi Landesman said , “has been definitely in favor of the congregational set-up, the daily religious school that meets after public school hours under congregational auspices. If this movement which is primarily associated with synagogues affiliated with the United Synagogue of America is to be advanced. a responsibility rests upon us to give it intelligent and proper guidance.”
A session of the Women’s League named Mrs. Charles I. Hoffman, former national president, as the year’s “Mother in Israel.”
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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.
