Outlook for Judaism in U.S. Discussed at Conservative Convention

“Within 25 to 50 years in America, a Jew will find it difficult to define the title Jew unless the name bears unmistakable relationship to religion and to the synagogue,” Rabbi Edward T. Sandrow, president of the Rabbinical Assembly of America, declared today. He addressed the 1961 biennial convention of the New York Metropolitan Region of the United Synagogue of America, central body of the Conservative religious movement. More than 1,000 delegates are attending the parley.

Rabbi Sandrow, who attended the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem as a representative of a non-Zionist national rabbinical body, took issue with the organizations in the United States that criticized Israel’s Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion for the remark which he made in his speech at the Zionist Congress, quoting the sages as declaring that any Orthodox Jew who does not live in Israel is not fulfilling the Mizvot. (commandments) of the Torah.

“The totality of Ben-Gurion’s speech was lost; he is completely consistent and did not say anything he has not said right along,” Rabbi Sandrow emphasized. He reported that “the Rabbinical Assembly of America, as the only national rabbinic body represented at the Zionist Congress, recommended, not the liquidation of the World Zionist Organization, but its broadening into ‘the Jewish community of the world.”

Speaking about the future of Judaism in the United States, Rabbi Sandrow said that “the real Jew in this country is doomed not to perpetual extinction but to perpetual frustration and conflict.” He urged Conservative Jews in this country to work for Israel, because, outside America, it is “the only place that can contribute to the survival of our way of life.”