Jewish Groups Urge Ban on Grants to Schools Practicing Segregation

The National Community Relations Advisory Council, which is the joint policy-forming body for 39 Jewish organizations, today decided to support proposals pending in Congress for Federal grants to the states for public school construction. However, the NCRAC urged that such Federal aid be denied to states which maintain racially segregated school systems.

The decision was adopted by the NCRAC executive committee on behalf of the American Jewish Congress, Jewish Labor Committee, Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, United Synagogue of America and 33 Jewish councils in communities throughout the country. In announcing the action, Bernard H. Trager, chairman of the NCRAC, denounced “those elected representatives of the people in Congress, who are ready to flout the authority of the very government whose laws they are sworn to uphold in order to maintain the discredited doctrine of racial separation.”

Mr. Trager announced also that proposals for a joint Congressional commission, to study the Federal loyalty-security program had the support of the Jewish organizations comprising the NCRAC. He released a statement submitted to the Subcommittee on Reorganization of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, which concluded hearings on the joint commission proposal last week, in which the Jewish groups declare:

“Ways must be found simultaneously to keep our nation secure against sabotage, subversion and espionage and our Bill of Rights equally secure against attrition and erosion by the operations of our own government.” The present program had demonstrated its inadequacy, the statement asserts. The Chasanow and Ladejinsky cases, the statement said, caused the United States Government to lose prestige “in the eyes of its own people as well as those of other nations.”