UAHC Deplores Threats of Violence and Appeals to Prejudice in the Presidential Election Campaign

The Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC) deploring “threats of violence and appeals to prejudice” in the Presidential election campaign today” called on Black and Jewish leaders to form a “Coalition of Conscience” aimed at “building together a just society.”

A resolution of the UAHC’s policy-making Board of Trustees declared: “The traumas of the moment must not be used to justify the Jewish community’s withdrawal from our historic commitment to social justice and to cooperative efforts for decency.”

The action came at the semi-annual meeting of the Board at which Charles Rothschild, of Teaneck, N.J., presided. The resolution was introduced by Harris Gilbert of Westfield, N.J., chairman of the UAHC’s Committee on Social Action.

It condemned “threats of terrorism and reprisals directed against Blacks or Jews, whether emanating from the Jewish Defense League or the Nation of Islam. We are troubled,” the UAHC trustees said, “that Presidential candidates and other leaders of American public opinion have failed to adequately respond to these assaults on the democratic process.”

The Reform Jewish leaders declared: “For years Jews and Blacks have been natural allies in the struggle for social justice in America, working in coalition for the common cause… Only the haters seeking to separate us from each other and from the rest of society, benefit from the alienation of Blacks and Jews, each the victim of prejudice and persecution in different ways over the centuries.”

The resolution called on the UAHC’s 770 congregations to “initiate a program of dialogue with Black churches and other representative Black organizations, to invite local Black officials to speak in our synagogues as part of a continuing effort to establish closer ties with them and to undertake ongoing programs to assert our common concerns and interpret our differences in an atmosphere of friendship and understanding.”

CAMPAIGN ‘BEFOULED’BY ANTI-SEMITISM

Rabbi Alexander Schindler, UAHC president, in an address that opened the discussion on the weekend theme, “Whither Black-Jewish Relations?”, told the UAHC board:

“We are experiencing the first Presidential campaign in memory that has been befouled by anti-Semitism. The surrogate of a Presidential candidate praises Hitler and threatens Jewish lives but the candidate refuses to disavow him. The candidate himself laces his language with ethnic slurs, belatedly apologizes and even then doesn’t acknowledge the gravity of his language.” The surrogate was an apparent reference to Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, a Black Muslim group. The candidate referred to Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Schindler also pointed out that “Equally hurtful was the silence of almost everyone else. The other Presidential candidates bobbed and weaved as artfully as did Mr. Jackson,” an apparent reference to Walter Mondale and Sen. Gary Hart. “The president himself chose not to comment. Christian leaders seemed not to notice at all, and Black civil rights leaders were silent, too, closing racial ranks even while they summoned us, as Jews, to condemn extremism in our community by the JDL.”

Continuing, Schindler said: “Couple all this with the Rev. Jackson’s freely acknowledged sympathies with the PLO, his criticism of Israel and his associations with anti-Jewish elements in the Black community and you begin to take the measure of our distress.”

Despite these concerns, he added, “the Jackson candidacy illuminates causes with which Jews must be identified. The needy are our business, too. Feeding the hungry, freeing the bound, healing the sick — that is the true Jewish vocation.” The UAHC president declared: “We must not permit the offensiveness of Jackson’s rhetoric and manner to obscure the moral worth of his domestic agenda.”

The UAHC resolution called for strengthening cooperation with the NAACP through the Kive Kaplan Institute “to express in institutional form the commitment to civil rights and civil liberties,” shared values of the UAHC and NAACP. The Institue is named for the late Kive Kaplan, a long-time leader of the UAHC who also served as chairman of the Board of the NAACP.

The resolution also called for programs to bring minority students to Israel “so that they may come to know and appreciate the one democratic country in the Middle East, the land where so many homes and dreams of the Jewish people repose.”