A leading Orthodox scholar told a concluding session of the 62nd national convention of Agudath Israel here that while there was “good reason to fear the ascendancy of the radical right and the imposition of sectarian values” on the American society, “the danger on the other side is greater.”
Prof. Aaron Twerski of Hofstra University in Long Island, added that “the pressure to implement unthinking egalitarianism on all communities threatens the existence of Orthodox Judaism and its institutions” in the United States. Some 3,000 members and guests attended the five-day convention.
Twerski made his comments in a debate on religion and politics with Rabbi Berel Wein of Suffern, N.Y., dean of Yeshiva Shaarei Torah of Rockland County in Monsey, N.Y.
Wein said he strongly favored strengthening of the wall of church-state separation as a matter of “utmost importance” to the security of Jewish life in America but he also advocated a low profile for the Jewish community in the public debate over the issue of religion in politics.
ROLE OF EVANGELICAL RIGHT CITED
He warned that “in a society that is empty” of religious values because of “the excesses of secular culture, the evangelical right had full expectations of Christianizing America.” He said also that many cult groups and Christian missionaries had “almost unlimited funds pouring into a campaign to capture Jewish souls.”
In contending that the new moral climate sought by these groups could have a “devastating effect” on Jewish life in America, Wein said that the dangers from the Evangelical Right must be seriously considered as a major concern in any policy decision on church-state issues.
Twerski, while conceding the danger to religious freedom entailed in capitulation to demands of the Christian Right, nevertheless argued vigorously for participation by Orthodox Jews in efforts to combat such legislation as the Equal Rights Amendment and regulations which would force Orthodox institutions to hire homosexuals as a condition of doing business with the government.
SAYS HOLOCAUST IS NOT REDUCIBLE TO MONUMENTS
Rabbi Dovid Cohen of Brooklyn expressed serious reservations, at another session, over the tendency to conceive memorials to the Holocaust tragedy in terms of physical monuments. He said American Jewry must come to appreciate the “constructed state” of pre-war European Jewry before it can know the meaning of the destruction of European Jewry.
He said that “for those who lived through the Holocaust,” the question was hardly “how to remember — how can one forget?” For those Jews who had not experienced the Holocaust, he said the question was: “How can they appreciate the destruction of European Jewry without having known its state of spiritual splendor?”
NEED TO CONFRONT ‘ENEMY FROM WITHIN’
Rabbi Moshe Sherer, who was reelected president, called on Orthodox Jews to confront “the enemy from without and the enemy from within” in meeting the issues facing American Orthodoxy.
Sherer assailed the secular Jewish organizations which recently united to sign a declaration about the Law of Return, in which they warned that implementation of the Orthodox demand that converts under non- Orthodox auspices should not be eligible for entry under that law could creat a deep split throughout the world between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews.
He said that declaration was “an unprecedented meddling by secular Jewish groups in a Halochic issue outside their competence which can have serious consequences.”
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