A second World Conference of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Congregations will be held in two years, according to Rabbi Joseph Karasick, president of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, who also flatly denied at a press conference here that he had taken a position at the first conference in Jerusalem that the Israel Government should bar Conservative and Reform Jews from entering as immigrants.
He told the weekend press conference that any proposal that Israel should bar non-Orthodox Jews was an “absurdity.” Reports from the conference said that Rabbi Karasick had been barred by the conference presidium from making such an intended statement in his address to the conference opening on January 8. Rabbi Karasick confirmed that he had told the session that Conservative and Reform Judaism were “divisive ideologies” which “should not be imported into Israel.” Rabbi Karasick also told the press conference that “there was no censorship whatever exercised by the World Conference or by any of its committees.”
He also touched on widespread advance criticism of the conference, made by Orthodox groups in this country and elsewhere, whose leaders had voiced concern that the conclave would seek to establish a permanent organization which would deal with issues of Jewish Religious Law. He said that the outcome of the Jerusalem conclave should have dispelled such fears.
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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.
