Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, preaching yesterday in the Free Synagogue, Carnegie Hall, said the only redeeming hope of the world can be that Israel and Christendom stand together. His sermon was on “What Christians Should Remember and Jews Forget.”
Dr. Wise attacked Reichsbishop Ludwig Mueller for the Nazi clergyman’s recent assertion that “Christ was the first of the anti-Semites.”
“Nothing could be further from the truth, nothing could be a grosser travesty of the truth, no fouler libel against Jesus could be devised,” Dr. Wise said. “One might just as validly urge that Abraham Lincoln was anti-Anglo-Saxon or George Washington anti-American.
SEVERENESS OF PROPHETS
The rabbi declared Christians should remember at this season that nowhere is there to be found “the faintest scintilla of evidence” that Christ sought to take himself out of the Jewish people or to create an ecclesiastical organization to supersede the synagogue “wherein as a Jewish child he had been reared.”
“If at times Jesus spoke in grave rebuke to them among his brothers who seemed to be wanting in the vision or the will to obey the word of God,” Dr. Wise said, “it must be admitted that he was no harsher nor severer than have been the prophets of every age who, without forsaking or deserting their people, have almost uniformly employed terms of bitterest reproach against them.
“Jesus was no more un-Jewish when he scourged a handful of money-changers out of the Holy of Holies than President Roosevelt was anti-American when in his inaugural address he too spoke in lashing terms against the moneychangers of a day nineteen centuries after Jesus.”
UNITED RESISTANCE TO PAGANISM
Dr. Wise said the Jew must forget “what he has endured throughout too many and grievous Christ-less centuries,” adding that persecution and injustice suffered in the past were “the denial and repudiation” of Christianity.
“The Jew would sin if he forgot that in this crisis of the world’s history, in the presence of perhaps the mightiest insurrection of paganism and barbarism which the world has witnessed in 1,000 years, the only redeeming hope of the world can be that Israel and Christendom stand together in united resistance to the enslaving forces of that barbaric paganism which would reinstate the godlets of passion and of lust and substitute them for the God of justice and of truth and of love whom Christian and Jew together worship.”
FASCISM AND WAR
War was characterized as the biggest and most profitable business of modern times by Rabbi Israel Goldstein, preaching yesterday at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, 257 West Eighty-eighth street.
He advocated nationalism of the armament industry as a step which would remove one of the chief obstacles standing in the path of disarmament efforts.
“There will still remain the fundamental cause of war—namely, an economic system which leads to fascism within a country and imperialism without,” Dr. Goldstein said. “But at least the first step will have been taken to remove one of the major provocations to wars.”
Nothing should be permitted to halt the Senate investigation into “the disgusting armament business,” Dr. Goldstein asserted. “The war business cannot stand the light. Let more of the searchlight be played upon it.”
PROFITEERS CONDEMNED
War profiteers were called traitors yesterday by Rabbi William Margolis in his sermon at Congregation Ohab Zedek, 118 West Ninety-fifth street.
“Those who waxed fat while the souls of men grew lean are the world’s most hateful, horrible parasites,” Rabbi Margolis said.
“The thick veneer of political pomposity, industrial prominence and social standing ought to be ripped off those hypocritical names as they are now by the Senate inquiry, and exposed to the world in all their naked ugliness.
“They are, in truth, the lowest types of traitors and deserters—traitors to their own country’s idealism and democracy and deserters from the vast human army of brotherhood whose banner is inscribed with the God-given ideals of Justice, Equality and Peace.”
SEES HOPE FOR GERMAN PEOPLE
Hope for the salvation of the German people was expressed yesterday by Rabbi Isaac Landman in Congregation Beth Elohim, Eighth avenue and Garfield place, Brooklyn.
The fact that “heroic churchmen and brave souls such as the Archbishop of Munich, His Eminence Cardinal Faulhaber remain in the Reich” was cited by Rabbi Landman as the reason for this hope.
“A Jew glows with gratefulness when he reads the Cardinal’s defense of Jewish Scriptures,” he said.
“ANOTHER STAIN” ADDED
Rabbi Joseph Zeitlin said “another stan has been added to the much-too-soiled record of the land of Kultur” in his sermon at Temple Ansche Chesed, West End avenue at 100th street.
“What a tragic reflection upon the Hitler land when it boasts of the fact that before the Hitler government came into power there were about 4,500 Jewish students in the colleges and the universities and now, through its method of ‘purification’ there are but sixteen ‘non-Aryans’ in the universities.
Rabbi Zeitlin asked how long civilized humanity could remain silent “in the face of such prejudice and unparalleled bigotry.”
BRITISH AND PALESTINE
Confidence that the British will do right by the Jews in Palestine was expressed by Rabbi Levinthal of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, 667 Eastern Parkway, in his Friday night sermon.
“I may be a stubborn optimist, but I have faith that the British government will help in the creation of the Jewish homeland,” Rabbi Levinthal said. He urged that all Jews unite on the Zionist program.
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.
