Daily Digest of Public Opinion on Jewish Matters

[The purpose of the Digest is informative: Preference is given to papers not generally accessible to our readers. Quotation does not indicate approval.–Editor]

More than a mere change in name is implied in the new title just taken by the United Hebrew Charities which will call itself hereafter the Jewish Social Service Association, declares the New York “Times” of Mar. 22.

“Behind this new designation,” the paper holds, “lies an entirely new conception of the place and scope and method of charitable relief in the modern world. Even the word ‘charity,’ beautiful in itself, and connected for centuries with a noble and humane tradition, has come to imply a sort of haphazard, ill-regulated benevolence, not in keeping with present-day ideas. To many it connotes casual almsgiving–the attempt to discharge a permanent social obligation by making a present of money to persons in need, and just letting it go at that. It is, we presume, partly to avoid this significance of the word charity that the United Hebrew Charities wish to drop it from the name of their society.

“A larger motive was undoubtedly the desire to emphasize the new conception of the way in which today the whole problem of dealing with misfortune and want has to be attacked and solved.”

Not only the change from “charity” to “social service,” the “Jewish Morning Journal” observes, but the change from the term “Hebrew” in the original name to “Jewish” in the new name, is like wise in harmony with the spirit of the times.

While in the strict scientific sense “Hebrew” designates national adherence and “Jew” refers to religious affiliation, we are told, the term “Hebrew” nevertheless represents in the popular conception “something old-fashioned–aristocratic, a sort of disguised expression which does not convey what the emphatic and more modern ‘Jew’ does.”

FORD AND THE RUSSIAN MONARCHISTS

There is good reason to believe, avers Jacob Fishman in the “Jewish Morning Journal,” (Mar. 22) that there is truth in the statement attributed to Markoff, anti-Semite and monarchist, now in Berlin, that Henry Ford has sought an alliance with the Russian monarchists for the purpose of restoring the monarchistic regime in Russia and to combat Jews.

In confirmation of this assertion Mr. Fishman points to an editorial in the “Dearborn Independent” of March 13 where, to quote Mr. Fishman, it was stated:

“Ford and his editor are pleased that the President has spoken a kind word for Italy and Mussolini (?) but they are irritated that Otto Kahn has said the same thing first. It seems to them that the President is a parrot who repeats what the ‘international’ Jewish bankers say. If Mr. Coolidge wants to show that he is independent let him issue a friendly statement toward Poland, which is a Christian nation. This would prove that he does not permit the Jewish financiers to dictate to him.”

BREVITES

A plea that children receive Biblical names rather than the hybrid ones of today was made Saturday by Rabbi Herbert Goldstein in his sermon at the Institutional Synagogue, 37 West 116th Street, New York.

“I urge that we return once more to the good old fashioned biblical names which will serve as a finer inspiration to our children than the hybrid ones one may hear today,” Dr. Goldstein said.

Weakening in the strength of the Ku Klux Klan in Suffolk County, which had been classed as the strongest numerically in Klandom in the State, is indicated by local elections the past week, according to observers, in River-head, L. I.