A Long Island rabbi has advocated the inclusion of sex education courses in the curricula of public and Hebrew schools. Dr. Stanley M. Wagner, rabbi of the Baldwin Jewish Center, called on the Jewish community to “vigorously support” courses in family life and sex education for the young. He spoke on “Judaism and the sexual revolution” at a meeting of the Nassau-Suffolk B’nai B’rith Council.
Rabbi Wagner, honorary president of the Nassau-Suffolk Association of Rabbis and the Long Island Commission of Orthodox Rabbis, maintained that “the traditional sources of ethical and moral disciplines, the home, the school, the Bible, have proven powerless within the context of the modern American milieu in shaping the attitudes and values of our young people.”
He urged schools and the religious community to become “value oriented rather than information oriented” in order to “provide children with the kind of guidance which they so sorely require in these days of general spiritual unrest.”
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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.
