Rza Urged to Revamp Its Structure

Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, told members of the Religious Zionists of America yesterday to develop an activist program, change the organization’s leadership and seek to create a bloc with the United Zionist Revisionists and possibly with the Zionist Organization of America. Addressing a crowd at the Diplomat Hotel of what a JDL spokesman identified as RZA members, Kahane urged them to revitalize the RZA “so that it can become the glory that its founders meant it to be.”

The JDL leader had announced last month the beginning of a new “strategy” for his organization to “infiltrate” major Jewish establishment groups in the U.S. to “take these groups over ideologically.” His first move in that direction was to seek membership in the RZA as a follow-up to his joining the National Religious Party in Israel. The RZA, however, refused to accept him.

Kahane yesterday, as he did last week, rapped the RZA “for having allowed the movement to go downhill for 20 years, for losing membership, power and ideological content.” He pledged to work within the RZA through “peaceful, accepted democratic methods” to change the ideology and leadership. He said he would eventually form a group within RZA similar to that in the parent body of NRP to be known as “Lamakor” (To the Source).

The 10-point program of Lamakor, which was distributed at the meeting, says that aliya is a religious obligation incumbent on every Jew and galut must be eliminated; the educational curriculum in Israeli schools must be revamped to include Jewish values; the NRP must end its practice of registering non-Jews as Jews; the threat of U.S. pressure on Israel must be countered; priorities must be reordered in Jewish Federations to meet the needs of Jewish poor and yeshivot; and Jewish youth within RZA must be given a greater policy-making role.