Declaring that Jewish life must “cope with the reality” that political freedoms are becoming “a shrinking minority” throughout the world, David M. Blumberg, re-elected B’nai B’rith president, concluded the organization’s biennial convention with a call for “stubborn Jewish resistance” to safeguard Jewish communal rights.
The convention, largest in B’nai B’rith’s 133-year history, included, along with the large majority from the United States, delegates from Canada, Great Britain, Israel, continental Europe, Australia, South Africa and South America. Several delegations were from countries suffering economic and political instability, where anti-Jewish agitations and propaganda have been on the increase.
Blumberg warned against “any Jewish indifference” to the fact that four of every five of the world’s four billion population “live in nations governed by political tyranny and oppression.” The foreign policies of their regimes, he added, “have a profound impact on the rights of Jews to be Jewish wherever they live.”
Final business of the six-day convention was a meeting of a newly-elected B’nai B’rith Board of Governors which named Dr. Daniel Thursz, dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Social Work and Community Planning, as executive vice-president of B’nai B’rith, succeeding Rabbi Benjamin M. Kahn, who is retiring. Thursz will take over his new post on Jan. 1.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
