Jews in Britain Remain Split on Representation to Government

Efforts initiated a year ago by Dr. Abraham Cohen president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, to secure coordination among the various Anglo-Jewish organizations in the sphere of foreign affairs, with special reference to approaches to the British Government, have been unsuccessful. Dr. Cohen today told a meeting of the Board.

The president of the Board of Deputies laid chief responsibility for that failure at the door of the Anglo-Jewish Association, supported by the Agudas Israel. He declared that the status of the Board as the representative body of British Jewry was being challenged, asserting that this was a challenge that not the Board alone but the entire community must meet “squarely.”

Reviewing the negotiations carried on by the Board with the AJA, Agudah, British Section of the World Jewish Congress and the World Union for Progressive Judaism, Dr. Cohen said that the AJA and the Agudah had rejected, in effect, the argument that because the Board was the elected representative body of British Jewry it alone was entitled to speak and act in the name of British Jewry. “They demanded parity with the Board for all British sections of institutions which have received nongovernmental status,” he reported.

This was not the first time that the Anglo-Jewish Association had claimed that it was a pioneer in Anglo-Jewry’s activity in foreign affairs, Dr. Cohen stated. “And this delusion–for such it is–has been a disturbing factor in the Anglo-Jewish Association’s relationships with the Board,” he charged.

ISSUE TO BE TAKEN UP IN SYNAGOGUES AND AT MEETINGS

He called upon the Anglo-Jewish community, in the forthcoming annual meetings in synagogues and institutions to place this issue on its agenda. “We shall then know whether Anglo-Jewry wishes to continue as a coherent, democratically organized community through the Board, or whether it is to be split up, as in the United States, into several competing, self-constituted bodies,” he insisted.

(Rev. Cohen initiated the talks seeking coordination a year ago, following widespread concern expressed throughout the community at the separate approaches to various Ministers of the British Government by Jewish deputations which on occasion represented differing points of view–all of which the Ministers were asked to accept as the Jewish view.)

The Board meeting today was told that the British section of the World Jewish Congress had accepted the Board’s proposals for coordination, but had not been able to bind its European and world executives not to make separate approaches to the British Government on matters of Jewish concern.

In the course of today’s debate, however, a WJC spokesman indicated that had the Anglo-Jewish Association gone along with the Board’s proposals, the WJC European and world executives could have been brought into discussions at which an agreement probably could have been reached. An AJA spokesman, on the other hand, blamed the WJC’s inability to commit its European and world executives for the breakdown of the talk.