Representatives of two Jewish organizations testified today at the hearing of the House Subcommittee on Labor and Education on the Kennedy Administration school aid bill in which financial assistance to parochail schools is barred on the grounds that such Federal aid constitutes a violation of the Constitution which separates the State from the Church. The Jewish spokesmen took sharply contradictory positions.
Dr. Leo Pfeffer, general counsel of the American Jewish Congress, warned the subcommittee members that religious liberty in the United States would be endangered by any provision of Federal loans or grants to religious schools. However, Rabbi Morris Sherer, executive vice-president of the Orthodox Agudath Israel of America, said that his organization “strongly” favored Federal aid to parochial schools. He said his organization deplored the “incorrect image” of the Jewish position on the issue as being one of total opposition.
Dr. Pfeffer said that the Catholic demand for federal funds to support parochial schools represented “the most serious assault upon the wall of separation between church and state in the history of our nation. ” He added that if it succeeded, “it might well mark the beginning of the end of our public school system.”
Rabbi Sherer, marking the first stand by any Jewish spokesmen before Congress in favor of Federal aid to religious schools, cited “a network of 251 elementary and secondary parochial schools” created by American Orthodox Jews “under extremely difficult financial circumstances.”
He said that it was the view of his organization that to deny to the “tax-paying American citizens of the Orthodox Jewish faith” who send their children to religious schools “the benefit of their taxes to help defray the large expense of maintaining the Jewish parochial school system for their children is a discrimination which is not in accordance with basic American ideals.”
He urged that “Federal aid to parochial schools be included in any government program of school support” and said that such aid had nothing to do with the principle of State-Church separation. “This type of government support will merely return to the taxpayer the full benefit of his taxes, to which he is justly entitled, without compelling him to endure a system of double taxation, ” Rabbi Sherer asserted.
Prior to the appearance of the two Jewish spokesmen, the Kennedy Administration sent to the Congress a lengthy legal memorandum in support of the President’s position that across-the-board loans to sectarian schools would be unconstitutional. The memorandum also asserted that loans to such schools were Just as much a form of support as grants and “equally prohibited by the Constitution.”
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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.
