The Rabbinical Assembly of America, comprising 335 rabbis throughout the United States, today issued a statement declaring that it “responds with indignation to the creation of the American Council for Judaism” which opposes political Zionism.
The statement which was unanimously adopted by the Assembly’s executive council, accuses the founders of the American Council for Judaism of being carried away by their fear that efforts to achieve majority status for Jews in Palestine would be resented as unpatriotic by American Christians. “Such fears are not only groundless, but are an insulting reflection on the fairness, understanding and genuine democracy of our Christian neighbors,” the resolution reads. It emphasizes the need of Palestine as a Jewish National Home capable of absorbing mass immigration of Jews from Europe after the war.
Refuting the charge that the effort to establish a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine was irreligious because it was secular, the statement said: “If interest in the survival of the Jewish people and its right to a national life in Palestine is secularism, then the prophets, rabbis, saints and martyrs of Israel and the authors of its traditional liturgy were all of them secularists. The Zionist movement is for us a religious movement.” The Rabbinical Assembly is headed by Rabbi Louis M. Levitsky of Newark.
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