“There has never been a more crucial need for courageous leadership and unity of feeling among the Jewish people than today,” declared Joseph C. Hyman, Secretary of the Joint Distribution Committee, guest speaker in opening the second series of the Julie Hirsch Klein Lecture Course of the Ohab Zedek Sisterhood last night.
“With the universal economic unsettlement, the Jew is again made the scapegoat of the peoples, the step-child of the nations. There is need of the Maccabean spirit which this holiday season commemorates. In all directions, forces of disunity are tending to draw us apart. Communities are divided among themselves. Causes which should supplement each other, compete with ane another.
“Eighteen years of splendid devotion to world Jewry, through the Joint Distribution Committee, is being dissipated through the failure of men of small mind and smaller courage to recognize the unity of Israel. It is not merely in Poland, in Roumania, in Austria, in Germany, in Hungary, that Jewish institutions of culture and of succor are crumbling, but right here in the United States thousands of congregations are in dire straits—temples, synagogues, communal buildings. The number of contributors to our philanthropies and our educational associations have dwindled.
“At least half of the Jewish people in lands abroad are in a socially and economically unhealthy condition. Only when the Jewish people retain their feeling of brotherliness, their sense of kinship and unity, and under leaders who are unafraid to go forward to rebuild this structure of the underlying oneness of Israel, can we achieve self-respect and pride in our own community.”
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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.
