Jewish Congress Plans to Intensify Its Activities, Lelyveld Reports

The American Jewish Congress announced plans here today to “step up its programs against religious and racial discrimination and strengthen its activities in the fields of church-state separation, Negro-Jewish relations, peace, Soviet Jewry and the Middle East.” The announcement was made by Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld, newly elected president of the organization, at a press conference.

In the field of Jewish culture, Rabbi Lelyveld announced the establishment of a National Council on Art in Jewish Life, which will be staffed by the director of the organization’s Commission on Jewish Affairs. He also cited a special research study already underway to determine the attitudes of Jewish collegians toward their Jewishness and the Jewish community. The study is under the direction of Professor Leonard J. Fein of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He said that the fifth annual American-Israel Dialogue of the Congress to be held in Rehovot, Israel July 27-29 would deal with “The Nature of Jewish Distinctiveness in Israel and America.”

Asserting that the task of preserving traditional Jewish values could not be divorced from the need to apply them to contemporary issues, Rabbi Lelyveld said: “We cannot apply the ethics and imperatives of our faith unless we understand whence they have sprung and what they have meant in the heritage and history of our people. We cannot preserve these Jewish values unless we recognize them as vital, vibrant and pertinent to our day.”

Rabbi Lelyveld said it was the “unique character of our faith that Judaism is the whole of the Jew’s response to the world. We do not, and cannot, divide ourselves into Jewish and non-Jewish parts. It is significant that there is no word in classical Hebrew for religion, no word to distinguish or differentiate religion from life. Thus it is that we reject any separation between what is Jewish and what is worldly; between American activities and Jewish activities,” he declared.