Recommended policies and positions on many major current issues affecting Jewish community relations, together with recommended programs for advancing those policies, are presented in the tenth annual Joint Program Plan for Jewish Community Relations issued today by the National Community Relations Advisory Council.
The plan was developed cooperatively by the six national agencies and 69 community relations council comprising the NCRAC. It presents their joint evaluation of the significance of recent developments for the Jewish community. Against this background, the agencies jointly project what they consider desirable programs and projects.
The judgments and program recommendations are advisory. The participating agencies are not expected to accept or apply them uncritically, but rather to regard them as guides to their own planning. In this process, each agency adopts, modifies or rejects any of the recommendations, according to its own needs.
The plan ranges broadly over many areas of concern: civil rights, civil liberties, religious freedom and separation of church and state, overt anti-Semitism here and abroad, the radical right, inter religious relationships, the Middle East, American immigration policy, and others.
Overshadowing all other developments of the past year in their significance for Jewish community relations, the plan says, has been the expanding struggle for equal rights. It points out that “as Jews, we are deeply involved in the struggle for human rights and irrevocably committed to its successful fruition.”
RECOMMENDS OFFSETTING “ERRONEOUS IMPRESSIONS” OF NEGROES
The plan recommends that Jewish community relations agencies pursue programs to: “close the gap” between the commitments of the Jewish community and the behavior of individual Jews; press for adherence by all Jewish agencies, within the framework of their primary responsibilities, to policies and practices of racial nondiscrimination in employment, intake, admittance to facilities, and in their business and other dealings with contractors, lending institutions, and the like; and join in selected direct actions for equality.
Jewish agencies have an obligation to publicize among Negroes the fact that the agencies are nondiscriminatory, so that Negroes may know of the opportunities available to them, and also to offset “false and erroneous impressions” shaping Negro attitudes, the program plan asserts.
While declaring that the Jewish community is not in any sense responsible for the conduct of individual Jews, the plan recommends that, “in appropriate cases,” Jewish employers, Realtors and others he counseled “with a view to interpreting to them the importance of conforming their business practices to the requirements of equality of treatment and opportunity.”
At the same time, the statement points out that some Jewish merchants and others, willing to make concessions to Negro demands, have been prevented by threats of retaliation by segregationists. They lack information about relevant laws, procedures and resources that would help them to counter such threats and take actions “consistent with the advancement of equality,” and Jewish agencies should give them such information and other assistance, the plan says.
The plan backs the legislation proposed by the late President Kennedy to abolish the “national origins quotas” in the present federal immigration code and to replace it with a method of issuing immigration visas based on national needs, individual characteristics and the principle of “first come first served.”
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