Jewish Organizations Hail Congressional Report on Hate Groups

The American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith today issued statements hailing the report on neo-Fascist and anti-Semitic groups prepared by the House Committee on Un-American can Activities. The report is expected to be issued in Washington tomorrow.

Irving M. Engel, AJC president, said that the report was “an eloquent, timely, and instructive warning to the American people on the dangers presented by groups on the extreme right.” Henry Edward Schultz, national chairman of the ADL, described the report as “important in the defense of American democracy.”

“The American Jewish Committee fully approves the Congressional committee’s finding,” declared Mr. Engel, “that such individuals and organizations are ‘unscrupulously exploiting the menace of Communism to promote other activities equally subversive and equally un-American.’ Though the report is described by the House Committee itself as only preliminary, it reveals how these groups weaken America’s fight against Communism by spreading suspicion and disunity. Ample documentation from the literature of these groups and statements of their leaders demonstrate clearly the subversive quality of their activity.”

Mr. Engel recalled that little more than a year ago, President Eisenhower publicly declared: “Generalized and irresponsible attacks that sweepingly condemn the whole of any group of citizens are alien to America.” The President’s statement was made in reaction to the wholesale charge of subversive activity against important sections of American clergy. Subsequently, the House Committee invited the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. and the American Jewish Committee to offer assistance in order that the work of the House Committee might be carefully appraised for any suggestions which they might offer.

Mr. Schultz said the House Committee was to be congratulated. He added that the report of the Committee which specifically cites a Yorkville neo-Fascist group called the National Renaissance Party, and “Common Sense,” a hate publication edited by an anti-Semitic publisher, Conde McGinley, in Union, New Jersey, was “necessarily preliminary in nature.”

“It is essential,” the ADL chairman said, “that the Committee delve into the more widespread and dangerous hate-mongering of the Gerald L.K. Smiths, the Joseph P. Kamps, the reborn Ku Klux Klan movements and the many other individuals and organizations who constitute a threat to American beliefs and practices. The financial resources of these men and their organizations are far greater than those whom the Committee have already begun to investigate,”