There can be no dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization as long as it holds to its goal of destroying Israel Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld declared at his installation as president of the Synagogue Council of America ” I have reservations about calls to dialogue with the PLO, ” he said at a ceremony at Lincoln Square Synagogue following a meeting of the Council Plenum last Wednesday night.” I learned in Mississippi there are some limitations to the possibility of dialogue. You cannot dialogue with a person who has a knife at your throat.”
Lelyveld went to Mississippi in 1964 as part of a team of Cleveland clergy for service as a minister counselor in that summer’s voter registration effort. During that stay he was badly beaten by segregationists. In 1965, he received an award “for distinguished service to the NAACP and the cause of freedom.” He is a board member of the Martin Luther King Center for Social Change.
The rabbi suggested “four preparatory steps” to prevent an escalation of conflicts between American Black and Jewish communities:”…stop generalizing about ‘leaders’ or giving that designation to any one who is quoted in relation to the current rupture; analyze the areas of difference, separating our problems into manageable blocks rather than mixing affirmative action concerns into the complex difficulties of the quest for peace in the Middle East; seek to understand each other’s special point of view, and avoid perjorative statements or efforts to win ‘debating points.’ “
Harsh things have been said these last weeks by both Blacks and Jews, Lelyveld said. “I felt hurt at the widely publicized statement that what Jews did to aid the Black cause in the civil rights struggle of the sixties they did in their own self-interest. I reject this allegation as untrue.”
Lelyveld is senior rabbi of Fairmount Temple, Cleveland. He is a past president of the American Jewish Congress and the Central Conference of American Rabbis and was national director of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation. He succeeds Rabbi Saul I. Teplitz, Woodmere, N.Y., who was installed as honorary president.
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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.
