Gold Urges Jewish Communal Work to Reexamine Jewish Identity, Existence

Bertram H. Gold, executive vice president of the American Jewish Committee, challenged Jewish communal workers throughout the world today to reexamine the relationships between Jewish identity and Jewish education, between Israeli Jews and diaspora Jews, and between politico-sociological developments and Jewish survival. Gold was the keynote speaker at the opening session of the International Conference of Jewish Communal Service, held in the amphitheatre on Mt. Scopus. The Conference will continue through Friday, with other sessions at the Wise Auditorium of the Hebrew University here. The meeting brings together 500 Jewish community workers from 19 countries on five continents and Australia. The group last met in Israel four years ago. In presenting an overview of the mood of the world Jewish community today. Gold described it as “worried about the ultimate fate of Israel…about threats to the social order elsewhere…about the quality of Jewish life itself, its meaning today, its relevance to the needs of the young.” This mood was in contrast, he said, to the “heady optimism” that prevailed at the Conference’s last meeting in August, 1967, two months after the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War. The last four years, Gold pointed out, have been a time in which “the world’s favorable opinion of Israel has steadily eroded; ‘anti-Zionism’ has become a code word for ‘anti-Semitism,’ and social, political and economic dislocations all over the world have severely shaken the position of Jews outside Israel.” While noting that conditions of life very in Jewish communities from one geographic area to another, Gold cited a number of “common factors” that, he stated, bear on the situation of Jews wherever they live:

The hostility of the New Left to Israel, and the shifting of the focus of their anti-Western agitation from Vietnam to the Middle East; the marked increase in Arab propaganda all over the globe, carried on by Arab students in the United States and Western Europe, and tied most effectively to the problems of developing countries in the Third World; the current threat to the social order in democratic countries, attacks on traditional moral values, and the rise of political violence; the rise of a new generation of non-Jews with no memory of the Holocaust and no feeling of guilt because of it; the absolute and relative weakening of the Western nations and Christianity, with the accompanying rise of non-European peoples, non-Western cultures, and non-Biblical religions; the growth of nationalism and a corresponding growth in isolationism, in Europe as well as in the United States, which effect the political support available to Israel as well as the relationships between Jews in different countries. The world Jewish community, Gold declared, has reacted to these developments with “feelings of uneasiness and anxiety.” But in addition, he cited three specific reactions that, he said, are taking place throughout the Jewish world: A new mood, expressed by saying “in the end we can depend only on ourselves”; a new militancy and outspokenness, characterized by distrust of the Jewish establishment and by a widening of the gulf between the leaders and the led; a shift from the traditional left-of-center, liberal stance of most Jews, if not to a position on the right, at least closer to the center.

While he considered these reactions “understandable,” Gold warned against attitudes that would lead Jews “away from seeking allies and into an isolationism of our own.” He declared this would be “tragically self-defeating” and indicated that “long-established groups such as the American Jewish Committee will have to reexamine some of their dearly held convictions and possibly form new kinds of coalitions,” Stating that “the internal condition of Jewish communities outside Israel seem to be pretty much the same everywhere,” Gold summed it up in one sentence: “Virtually all of them live with the nagging fear that Jewish identity is becoming less and less clearly defined and that Jewish continuity is threatened.” He pointed out that “everywhere one hears urgent appeals to improve methods of Jewish education as a matter of first priority” and to provide more financial support to that education in order to keep Jewish youth identified with and committed to Jewish life. Part of the problem. Gold indicated, is that, in the scientific, secular culture of today, the acquisition of Jewish identity, values and group loyalty is not part of the normal life experience of the Jewish child as it was in the time of the old-time European shield. Rather, he pointed out, “in the United States and Western Europe today, Jewish education has become a private Jewish communal task, and its purpose is to strengthen identity as well as transmit knowledge.”