A leader of Reform Judaism called on America’s 5.5 million Jews to render “sacrificial support” of Israel through the contribution of funds and other activities even if it means reducing their own living standards. Rabbi Levi A. Olan, of Dallas, president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, delivered the keynote address at the 80th annual convention of the Reform rabbinic association which opened here today. He urged the organization to assume leadership in establishing an American-Jewish conference to devise economic and other programs to aid Israel in its struggle for peaceful existence and to prevent its “threatened extinction.”
Rabbi Olan said that while the existing organizational structure functioned adequately for normal times, a mobilization similar to the one achieved at the time of the Six-Day War was needed now, He said, “The time has come for American Jewry to arise with far more than the token support it is now bringing…The crisis is such that only an aroused American Jewish people, ready to lay their substance before their brothers threatened with extinction, can redeem this terrible hour of Israel’s lonely agony.”
Rabbi Olan said he viewed with “deep concern” the current peace moves involving the Big Four powers. He maintained that “the conscience of the world, with very few exceptions, is prepared to witness serenely this destruction of Israel even as it did only three decades ago in the gas chambers of Germany.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
