Eight thousand Orthodox Jews, led by 750 rabbis, jammed into Manhattan Center yesterday and heard major rabbinic scholars call on American Jews to “perpetuates the lessons of the Holocaust through a spiritual revival, which can only be achieved by Jewish adults becoming students of the Torah,” The assemblage, sponsored by Agudath Israel of America, marked a double event: the commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the Holocaust in which six million Jews died, and the seventh time Orthodox Jews have completed study of the 2720 folios of the Talmud since a system to study a page a day was instituted in 1922.
Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, an Orthodox scholar and dean of Mosifta Tifereth Jerusalem, a rabbinic seminary, declared that “Torah study is not for children alone, but the duty of every Jewish man for his entire life span as a prerequisite toward living a life of a fully committed faithful Jew.”
the audience included thousands of Jewish day school students who came in buses, Rabbi Chaskel Besser, a presidium member of Agudath Israel, expressed concern that the Holocaust would lose its significance to American Jewish youth. He warned that “One of the most awesome periods in Jewish history would very well join the thousands of bloodstained pages of Jewish history to which Jewish youth does not relate in any meaningful manner.” A proclamation was issued calling on educators to institute Holocaust studies into the curriculum of all Jewish educational institutions.
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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.
