In Time of Crisis

The American Jewish scene is not pleasant to contemplate at this time. The economic demoralization has naturally extended to the communal life of our people. Men who are harassed and worried by severe economic losses and are desperately engaged in a relentless struggle to save themselves from utter economic insolvency, cannot bring to their social and communal life a spirit of courage, generosity or enthusiasm. Men who occupied positions of importance in communities, buttressed by their financial contributive power, now, having suffered financial loss and unable to do what they once did, have come to regard their positions of leadership as anomalous and have retired from public life.

In times of economic collapse and uncertainty, even those whose resources are still ample for the discharge of their full community responsibilities, withdraw into a hard cautiousness and penuriousness. The budgets of charitable institutions have thus been sharply curtailed at a time when their services are in even greater demand than in normal times. Cultural institutions, religious and educational agencies have suffered severe and almost disastrous reduction in income. Somehow they are still regarded by many Jews as indulgences, as venial luxuries for times of genial prosperity, and not as bed-rock necesities of Jewish life.

A slow process of dismantling is proceeding in our communal life. Many of the institutions which American Jewry built up in recent years at great sacrifice of substance and energy are either being entirely discontinued or are being reduced to a shadow of their former selves.

Especially hard has the depression borne down upon our Jewish schools. The most gratifying phenomenon in Jewish communal life in America in recent years has been the splendid progress which was made in the extension, organization and improvement of Jewish education. Our communities, after an unconscionably long period of indifference, were becoming Jewish-school-minded. Our Jewish social workers, too, had come, albeit belatedly, to envisage Jewish education not only as a part, but as a most vital part, of organized Jewish communal life. The depression has put a check to this progress. Some schools have been closed. In others, staffs and budgets have been reduced, teachers’ salaries have been cut to meagerness and parsimony, and are being paid only intermittently. The inevitable drop in tuition fees plus the dwindling community support have left our schools in a position more precarious than at any time in our generation.

Those who have devoted their professional careers or their volunteer efforts to Jewish communal life are of course perplexed and depressed by this sad decline. Men given to passionate indignation will want to vent their righteous wrath upon their back-sliding people, and to castigate their failure and shortcomings with scorpion’s whips. We haven’t it in us to denounce at this time. Our people are in crisis. They are engulfed by disaster. They are distraught and unhappy. We know that our people are not traditionally hard-hearted or illiberal. When fortune smiled upon them they gave with a will, sometimes too well and none too wisely, and while the appeals, as a matter of course, were always greater than the response, nevertheless American Israel has no reason to be ashamed of the fine record of support which it gave to Jewish social and national causes both here and abroad. A few years of depression will not, we are persuaded, alter the psychology of our people.

For the present troubled hour, two things are necessary—a spirit of patience and fortitude on the part of leaders, and a continuous, tolerant and persuasive appeal to the intelligence and loyalty of our people not to permit the total destruction of those vital community agencies which they themselves had built and into which they had poured so much of their capital, their energies and their splendid enthusiasms.

The Jewish people is not liquidating its Jewish life because of the depression. Our history has been one of continuous and aggressive building, or at least of determined conservation, in times of depression and persecution. We are not strangers to crisis. Over long stretches of our national experience the mood of crisis was the normal mood. Our people did not permit itself to be diverted from the necessary tasks of national preservation, by unfavorable conditions, by sudden loss of political status or by economic disasters. Emergencies only impelled it to greater and more sacrificial effort.