Not only are the hopes of American Jews fixed upon the forthcoming American Jewish Conference which opens at the end of this month, but “it is not too much to say that world Jewry shares every high expectation of its outcome,” Rabbi Stephen S. Wise declares in a “forecast” published in the current issue of Opinion today.
“If some Conference dilettanti should urge that the world is wearied with stories of Nazi crimes against the Jews and that the point of saturation has been reached, let it be made clear that the victims have gone unheard, wholly unredressed, and almost unpitied,” Rabbi Wise states. “It is not only anger that has a privilege but a sense of oceanic and unmerited wrong. Definite truths must be brought to the full understanding of the delegates.”
Outlining the objectives of the Conference, Rabbi Wise says that “it may not be forgotten that it is sought to arrive at agreement respecting three leading problems. One, the status of Jews in the post-war world, including the right of repatriation for those to whom denuded, impoverished, stattered homes in long conquered lands are still home; Two, the indefeasible right of expatriate Jews to migrate to the lands, large or small, within the United Nations; and, finally, the duty of the United Nations to make it possible for Jews as a people to rebuild their Jewish National Home, a Jewish Commonwealth that shall conform to every standard of social-economic idealism, adumbrated and more than adumbrated by the miraculous resettlement of more than half a million Jews within fifty years.
“The Conference has still another objective, to name the men who shall present its decisions and hopes to the Peace Conference, or Conferences, that are bound to follow the war. Such choice comes to be a matter of lesser importance, if the Conference reach clear-cut decisions,” Rabbi Wise declares. “It goes without saying that the Conference is to be more than a series of complaints and much more than a series of compromises, and that its delegates to any world Conference after the war are not to be free agents, with power to whittle down or minimize decisions definitely reached by the Conference.”
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