New Jewish-negro Group Warns of Confrontation if University Cuts Student Admissions

A hitherto undisclosed group of Negro and Jewish leaders working for amity between the races warned here yesterday that potential budget cuts and reduced student admissions at City University could result in “a new confrontation between religious and racial groups” worse than the one that arose from last year’s New York City teachers’ strike. The group was established last October as a result of Negro-Jewish friction over the teachers’ walkout “to develop approaches to harmonious relationships between the two groups.” It calls itself a “Temporary Committee on Black-Jewish Relations” and includes influential figures of both communities.

Among its members who joined in the warning as individuals rather than representatives of their organizations were Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP; Whitney M. Young, Jr., executive director of the National Urban League; Robert Bernhard, president of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, Dr. David G. Salten, executive vice president of the Federation and Rabbi Abraham Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. The membership also includes former presiding justice of the Appellate Court, Bernard Boetein, who did not sign the statement because of his role as a consultant to Mayor John V. Lindsay.

The warning urged city officials to realize that “an intense competition for the remaining scarce places at the university could well set some segments of the population against others.” It warned against new “hysteria” and “intergroup explosions” which in the teachers’ strike situation, it said, involved “too many Jews, sensitive to centuries of anti-Semitism” and “too many Negroes justly pressing for a sound educational environment for their children which too long has been denied.”