The sad spectacle of Brooklyn’s largest Jewish community center being closed because contractors are pressing for further payments which have not been forthcoming owing to the failure of many people to pay up their pledges, faces the Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst, located in the heart of one of the city’s most important Jewish districts, unless $50,000 can be raised almost at once.
With Edward Lazansky, presiding Justice of the Appellate Division, and Mitchell May, Justice of the Supreme Court, lending their aid and support, Bensonhurst’s Jewry is now engaged in a house-to-house campaign to raise the money needed to keep the Jewish Community House from foreclosure.
Some 5,000 Jewish youth are served by this center, which is one of the three or four largest in the country. With Eli Guthman as chairman of the committee, and Judge Frank Wasserman as trustee, all means are being mobilized to get the $50,000. Under the slogan of “shall it be proud heads held high or sack cloth and ashes?” the Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst is making a determined effort to avoid what everyone admits would be a dire calamity for some 125,000 Jews in the neighborhood, the closing of the community house.
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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.