Mrs. Wise Honored at Jewish Congress Dinner on Ten Years’ Service

Mrs. Stephen S. Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress Women’s Division, was honored for her ten years’ leadership of the organization with a dinner tonight at the Hotel Roosevelt, held in connection with the women’s division’s three-day annual convention. Scheduled speakers included Prof. Albert Einstein, Governor Herbert H. Lehman and the Rev. William C. Kernan.

A call to America to awaken to the immediate necessity of strengthening its inner defenses to preserve democracy against the “Fifth Column” was urged at a symposium last night opening the convention. Speakers asserted that the defense of American democracy must be undertaken simultaneously with the defense of American borders against invasion.

Speakers included Newbold Morris, president of the City Council, Assemblyman Robert F. Wagner Jr.; M. Maldwin Fertig, member of the New York State Trasit Commission; Mrs. Stephen S. Wise, president of the Women’s Division, and Miss Milly Brandt, a vice-president, who presided.

The speakers urged the American people to awaken now to the lessons of the development in Europe and to erect immediately the inner defenses essential to the preservation of American civilization. They forecast the time is not far distant when the American Government will have to take a hand in erecting these inner defenses.

Assemblyman Wagner affirmed that “there could be nothing more unpatriotic in this land of many peoples and many creeds and many races than the persecution of minorities and the fomenting of hatred and strife on the basis of race or religion.”