Dr. Stephen S. Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress today challenged the American Jewish Committee to submit the World Jewish Congress question to a national referendum of Jewish adults in a statement that charged the Committee and the Joint Distribution Committee with opposing the world congress because they “are fearful of the disintegration of their authority and standing in Jewish life through the organization of democratic forces of the Jewish people.”
Opposition to the world parley was expressed by the American Jewish Committee in a statement signed by Dr. Cyrus Adler, president, and Sol M. Stroock, chairman of the executive committee, which held that the congress “would have no power to enforce its decisions,” that it could not speak for responsible bodies opposing it and that it would “endanger the status of the Jews in the countries of which they are citizens.”
Dr. Adler and Mr. Stroock held the congress proposal “in effect a plan to supplant tried agencies which have done notable service for the Jews of the world…and replace them by an organization which would be without the means or power to carry into effect the plans which have been and are continuing to be set up, and which have been of great benefit to the Jews in those countries in which such benefits are so urgently required.”
In the presence of 1,000 delegates at the Manhattan electoral conference for the congress at the Hotel New Yorker yesterday, Dr. Wise tore up a copy of a circular letter opposing the congress which had been issued by the American Jewish Committee, calling it “libelous” and “un-Jewish” and adding: “We have to fight Hitler with one hand and the American Jewish Committee with the other.”
The conference, after hearing Georg Bernhard, German-Jewish refugee journalist, who argued that the congress was necessary, and other speakers, elected eighty delegates to the national conference in Washington June 13 and 14 which will elect and instruct the American representatives to the World Jewish Congress in Geneva August 8.
Reading from a fifteen-page official reply of the American Jewish Congress to the arguments of the American Jewish Committee, Dr. Wise charged the committee with “an elaborate avoidance of clarity; an interest in confusing and misrepresenting the actual purpose of the World Jewish Congress and a studied effort to create alarm, suggesting dangers without pausing to specify what these dangers are.
Dr. Wise accused the committee of being “obsessed by ghetto fears” and of conducting its campaign like a “low-grade political fight.” He said that the committee and the J.D.C. saw in the ideas and tendencies of the world congress “a menace to the undisturbed control and management which is exercised by the combination…” He added that “the issue confronting Jewish life today is that of democracy as against private control and management of Jewish affairs.”
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.
