The House of Representatives approved this weekend the Johnson Administration’s $1,300,000,000 aid-to education bill, many clauses of which had been attacked by Jewish organizations as contrary to the principles of church-state separation. Orthodox Jewry had, on the whole, however, supported those very provisions in the bill.
The clauses in the measure to which a wide variety of Jewish organizations objected included special services and arrangements such as shared-time classes, counseling and mobile units to be provided to students in parochial and other private schools, and $100,000,000 for free textbooks and library materials to students in both public and private schools, including parochial schools. The bill now goes to the Senate, where a committee has already approved the measure. President Johnson hailed the House action as “the greatest break-through in the advance of education since the Constitution was written.”
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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.