Rabbi Irving Lehrman, president of the Synagogue Council of America, today branded the Jewish Defense League “irresponsible merchants of doom” for exhorting American Jews to emigrate to Israel because a new holocaust could happen in the US. Rabbi Lehrman referred to a JDL advertisement that appeared yesterday in the New York Times announcing an emergency conference to be held May 7 at the McAlpin Hotel to organize the “mass aliya” of American Jews.
In a statement on behalf of the Synagogue Council, the coordinating body of Conservative, Reform and Orthodox Judaism in the US, Rabbi Lehrman said. “After Auschwitz there is no Jew anywhere in the world who can say with certainty ‘it cannot happen here.’ But the moral of that truth for American Jews, as for all American citizens, is that we must redouble our vigilance to make certain that it will not happen here. For neither Israel, nor the civilized world as we know it could survive such an eventuality in the United States which is still the best hope for mankind.”
The JDL said the purpose of the conference will be “to create a private, permanent, non-political mass aliya organization which will think in terms of bringing masses of Jews to Israel.”
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