New American Zionist Movement is Officially Launched in Miami

The American Zionist Movement was officially voted into existence in Miami this past weekend, and the new body elected Seymour Reich to be its president.

Reich is a past chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and president emeritus of B’nai B’rith International.

Simcha Dinitz, chairman of the executives of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization, hailed the organization’s founding.

Addressing 500 delegates attending the first American Zionist Congress since the founding of the Jewish state, Dinitz referred to the formation of the new group as “the birth of a new Zionism in America, a momentous occasion that will focus American Jewish attention on the urgency of participating in the upbuilding of Israel.”

The American Zionist Movement has replaced the American Zionist Federation and enlarged its scope. With this transformation, another Zionist body has been lost in the shuffle of bylaws.

And that is not at all an accident.

The body whose authority is being absorbed by the new Zionist Movement is the American Section of the World Zionist Organization.

While the Zionist Federation, and now the Zionist Movement, unites America’s Zionist organizations, the American Section has been the representative of the international World Zionist Organization. It consisted of those members of the WZO’s executive body who lived in America.

At its inception, prior to the creation of the State of Israel, it played the role of political activist on behalf of Jerusalem that has since been assumed by Israel’s ambassadors.

NO SEPARATE LAY LEADERSHIP

Since 1948, the American Section, legally a separate non-profit corporation, has been the American arm of the Jerusalem-based WZO. In that capacity, it was a registered foreign agent and was responsible for bringing over shlichim, the Zionist emissaries who came to the United States from Israel to do the work of the WZO.

In addition, it was charged with supervising their work, a task it handled at arm’s length.

The American Section will continue to fill out the paperwork with the Immigration and Naturalization Service for the shlichim.

But it will no longer have its own lay leadership or issue its own statements.

The Federation, and now the Movement, represented American Zionism by virtue of being an umbrella grouping of the American Zionist organizations such as Hadassah, the Zionist Organization of America, and the Association of Reform Zionists of America.

Representation on the broad-based board of the new Movement will be assigned to the constituent organizations in rough accordance with the formula used to represent them at the World Zionist Congress.

Currently, the formula reflects the 210,957 votes cast in a national mail balloting of American Zionists held in 1987.

Seats on the board will be reserved for the American members of the WZO Executive. But they will have no guarantee of a more coveted place in the Movement’s narrower and more functional Cabinet.