All rabbis throughout the country were urged today by Dr. Israel Goldstein, in his capacity as president of the Synagogue Council of America, which includes all the rabbinical groups in the country, to arrange community gatherings in which Christians should be invited to join “in a fellowship of mourning and indignation” over the Nazi massacres of Jews in Europe.
In a letter addressed to every rabbi in the United States, Dr. Goldstein informed the spiritual leaders of the Jewish communities that “the great central organizations of American Jewry, namely the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the B’nai B’rith and the Jewish Labor Committee, which, respectively, are taking other measures to meet the situation, have unanimously expressed deep satisfaction with the action which the Synagogue Council has undertaken in proclaiming July 23, the day of Tisha B’ab, as a day of grief and mourning far the victims of the Nazi massacred in the hundreds of Jewish communities of occupied European countries.
“You and your synagogue have a solemn privilege and obligation on the occasion of Tisha B’ab this year to provide for your people an outlet for this sorrow, to memorialise the martyrized dead, to sustain the hope and courage of the living and to enlighten the minds and stir the sympathies of our Christian fellow Americans,” Dr. Goldstein declared.
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