Rabbi Bemoans Cuts in Anti-poverty Funds, Warns of Deepening Resentments

A New York interfaith expert said here that the possibility of crippling cuts in federal anti-poverty funds by Congress represented “a major national disaster” which is undermining the hopes for peaceful realization of Negro aspirations, and posing the threat of a black nationalist “war of liberation” in this country.

Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum, director of interreligious affairs of the American Jewish Committee, who is also president of the National Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, told a news conference that the Congressional balking on adequate anti-poverty funds would add to an increasingly ugly mood across the nation. He said that he had found on visits to slum areas “a deepening mood of frustration and resentment” over the fund curtailment which was seen as a “racist tendency” that would contribute to “radical polarization of fanatic extremists on the one hand and the emergence of a white fascism on the other.”