Rabbinical Assembly Head Urges Creation of Central, Democratic, Policy Making National Jewish Body

Urging the creation of a central, democratic, deliberative national Jewish organization that can make definitive policy for all of American Jewry. Rabbi Mordecai Waxman said that while there are three organizations — the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Synagogue Council, and the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds — no one of them is completely representative of American Jewry.

Making his presidential address at the 76th annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly which opened here today, and will continue through Thursday, Rabbi Waxman said:

“In none of these bodies is a considered, coherent, democratic policy worked out for the American Jewish community. We need a broad-based organization which represents the organized community and can make policy and speak with authority. I feel that the synagogue community should initiate the process of creating such a body and make sure that the religious bodies which are concerned with the tone, the quality and the character of Jewish life take their part in determining the future of American Jewish life.”

‘SEEM TO BUMBLE ALONG’

Stating that “fortunately, we seem to bumble along,” the rabbi from Great Neck, New York, said that “the American Jewish community needs something better.” Discussing the three central organizations that now perform some aspect of policy making, Rabbi Waxman said:

“The Presidents Conference presumably represents the Jewish community to the American government, the United Nations and to the non-Jewish world on matters relating to Israel and some issues of international concern. Nevertheless, it almost never discusses policy, is almost always reactive and rarely initiative, and is a body whose actions and timing are largely determined by the generally able man who is its president. Since it is an umbrella organization, it must operate by a sort of consensus and avoid division. But like most umbrellas, this umbrella functions best when the sun is shining.”

Calling the Synagogue Council “another umbrella organization,” Rabbi Waxman said that it is “a reasonable representative of the Jewish religious community in ecumenical relations and is doing a fine job in its policy institute of raising issues and processing data.” Admitting that it provides a setting for rabbinic and lay religious bodies to get together, he lamented that “the price of that association is undefined but recognized limits of policy and action. The veto is as potent a weapon in the Synagogue Council as it is the United Nations and so broader issues of policy escape us.” He urged that its role “where the rabbinic and synagogue community can develop” be expanded.

Calling the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds “a powerful body which largely guides the distribution of the money raised by the American Jewish community,” he complained that “the “synagogue and the rabbinate as collective bodies have little role or input in it although it is made up of members of synagogues and individual rabbis.”

Stating that in recent years the Council “is certainly more Jewish in tone, far more Israel oriented than it was in the past,” the retiring leader of the Conservative rabbinate complained that the largest body of American Jews, the religious bodies “have little to do with determining its policies on controlling the distribution of funds which in turn make policy.” Stanley Rabinowitz, rabbi of the Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, was elected president of the Rabbinical Assembly.