ZOA Leader Assails ZOA President’s Attack on Azf

An honorary vice-president of the Zionist Organization of America bitterly assailed the ZOA’s president. Herman L. Weisman for making “intemperate and vituperative statements” against the mail ballot procedure selected by the American Zionist Federation for the election of American delegates to the World Zionist Congress, Rabbi I. Usher Kirshblum, spiritual leader of the Jewish Center of Kew Garden Hills in Queens, said in an open letter to Weisman that he dissociated himself completely from the ZOA leader’s stand. He defended Rabbi Israel Miller, president of the AZF, against Weisman’s charge last month that the election procedure was a “travesty of democracy” and that the AZF had engaged in “illicit side deals” with three Zionist bodies to allocate delegate mandates among themselves.

Rabbi Kirshblum wrote: “You are casting aspersions against the honesty of the type of election proposed by the American Zionist Federation at a time when you know fully well that a nonprofit election agency of proven integrity and experience will be employed to supervise the election. It is quite apparent that precisely because the postal elections, and not direct voting, will represent an affirmation of democracy that you are so much in fear of the former….By your present statements you are becoming responsible for developing a serious crisis and causing irreparable damage primarily to the ZOA itself. You have no moral right to disenfranchise the 106,000 Jews, whom you claim as members of the ZOA.”

Rabbi Kirshblum urged Weisman to “call upon all ZOA members to make a strenuous effort to roll up the strongest possible vote” and to stop “confusing and demoralizing our own members” by fighting the decision by more than 80 percent of the Election Committee to conduct balloting by mail.