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May Solemn Season Usher in Year of Blessing and Peach: Chief Rabbis’ New Year Message: Calls Attenti

September 11, 1931
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May the Solemn Season usher in a year of blessing and peace unto all the children of men, restoring confidence and prosperity to the nations, and removing the causes of instability and confusion in human societies, the Chief Rabbi writes in a New Year Message which he has sent to the J.T.A. to-day.

May our Heavenly Father grant increase of peace and spiritual power unto Israel, the message continues, and nullify all designs that would undermine our religious life. Under the auspices of the League of Nations, there is to be made next month a revolutionary and pagan attempt to change the Calendar, which would make the Sabbath fall on a different day of the week each year. This would destroy the Sabbathidea among large masses of our people, and menace with economic ruin millions of men for their loyalty to a command proclaimed in the Decalogue. It is our earnest prayer that the eyes of those responsible for the policy of the League of Nations be opened to its sacred charge to protect the religious rights of minorities.

The keynote of our devotions during the Solemn Season, the message concludes, remains Israel’s invocation to God to hasten the time when unrighteousness and oppression shall have passed away, like smoke, from the earth. May those prayers of the House of Israel find speedy fruition in the lessening of armaments among the peoples; so that they no longer put their trust in the might of the sword, but more and more in justice, righteousness and peace as the regulative principles in inter-racial and international relations.

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