Rabbi Charges Magazine Article is Insult to Jewish Community; Editor Distressed at Rabbi Being ‘upti

The editor of Philadelphia Magazine told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency today that he was “distressed” that a local rabbi should be so “uptight” as to condemn him for publishing an article designed, in the editor’s words, as “a lamentation for the excesses that go on in the celebration of bar mitzvahs.”

Alan Halpern, who has edited the 60-year-old magazine for the past 20 years, said the charge by Rabbi Gerald I. Wolpe, senior rabbi of Har Zion (Conservative) Congregation, was distressing because it indicated that “some Jews don’t have enough faith in the American experience” to withstand criticism of “materialistic” aspects of Jewish life.

In an editorial in the March 31 issue of the Har Zion Bulletin, Rabbi Wolpe said the article was not only “juvenile journalism” but “a tasteless insult to the Jewish community” and “an undisguised affront to every Jew in our community.” Further calling the piece “objectionable,” he singled out “the picture of a bar mitzvah boy in yarmulka, tallith and clutching envelopes to his breast” as “a more appropriate presentation of Streicher’s obscene anti-Semitic papers in Nazi Germany than of a local magazine.”

Urging local Jews to assert their right “to live in dignity” by protesting to the publication, Rabbi Wolpe declared: “If we do not have the courage of our own dignity then we deserve this attack. I do hope you will write, cancel and scream so anti-Semites of any religion or lack of religious persuasion will have to listen.”