Jewish Community Leaders Pay Tribute to Pincus

The late Louis A. Pincus was honored Thursday at an official Memorial Tribute of the American Jewish community in the auditorium of the World Zionist Organization. The meeting, sponsored jointly by the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel, paid homage to him as a great Jewish leader, a devout Zionist and as the man who further bridged the gap between Zionists and non-Zionists through the reconstitution of the Jewish Agency for Israel in 1971. Some 200 persons attended the event.

With Max M. Fisher, chairman of the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency presiding, the other speakers included Mrs. Charlotte Jacobson chairman of the American Section of the World Zionist Organization; Leon A. Dulzin, acting chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency and the WZO; Rabbi Israel Miller, president of the American Zionist Federation; Dr. Joachim Prinz, chairman of the Executive Committee of the World Jewish Congress; Jack Weiler, chairman of the United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York; and Isadore Hamlin, executive director of the American Section of the WZO.

STATUS QUO WAS NEVER GOOD ENOUGH

Fisher, with whom Pincus worked intimately in the reconstitution of the Jewish Agency, called his life “the story of one major contribution after the other to the glorious record of Israel’s accomplishments.” Fisher singled out for special tribute his work towards the reconstitution of the Jewish Agency, “which brought about full representation and participation of free Jewish communities of the world in the Agency’s work.”

Mrs. Jacobson, co-chairman with Fisher of the Memorial, stated that Pincus “would never accept status quo as being good enough.” Calling him a person “blessed both with creative ability and the gift of organization,” she spoke of him as a Zionist who “never shared the illusion that the movement had achieved its final goal with the emergence of the State, but was convinced that Zionism has the tremendous task of bringing the Jewish people to Israel and securing Jewish survival wherever Jews live.”

Dulzin, who has taken over Pincus’ responsibilities as acting chairman of the Jewish Agency, said that he still found it “impossible to think of Louis in the past tense.” Calling his passing “a tragic loss to the Jewish people,” Dulzin pointed out that Pincus was “a man of action who was particularly dedicated to the urgency of endeavors in behalf of Israel’s underprivileged, the searching for new, better and daring ways and means to facilitate aliya and the absorption of new immigrants, the struggle for the freedom of the Russian Jews to emigrate to Israel, and the strengthening of the Zionist movement in all the diaspora countries.”

BUILT BRIDGES BETWEEN ISRAEL, DIASPORA

Rabbi Miller, who conducted the services and read the El Mole Rachamim, said that Pincus “symbolized the ties which link Israel and Jews the world over; the embodiment of the concept of our being one people, and our responsibility for each other, for our common fate and history and destiny.”

Hailing Pincus as “a man of matchless courage and rare integrity,” Weiler said that he “will always be remembered as a bridge builder. He built bridges between Israel and the diaspora, between the disadvantaged and the more affluent of Israel, and finally as the man who built the bridge that brought 65,000 Russian Jews to Israel in the past few years. His legacy will be his achievement in helping create a world Jewry united for community purposes.”

Rabbi Prinz paid tribute to Pincus for his “world-wide vision, his desire to establish areas of communication between Israel and the diaspora, and between the nations of the diaspora themselves. He realized that world Jewry can best survive when each component part understands every other part.”

Hamlin, as an executive who worked under Pincus paid tribute to his “depth of knowledge and interest, the passion of his beliefs and the sense of personal responsibility that drove him relentlessly on even when fatigued, his wide open door, his lack of patience with bureaucratic procedures and niceties and his insistence on action.”