The planning of comprehensive and desirable emigration projects for Jews in Eastern Europe was urged by Dr. Joseph Rosen, president of the Agro-Joint, at the concluding dinner meeting last night of the fourth annual assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds. Five hundred persons attended the dinner.
Justice Samuel I. Rosenman of the New York Supreme Court, in the after math of a discussion Saturday night representing assimilationist and anti-assimilationist viewpoints, declared that a proper Jewish relationship could rest on the proposition that a man might simultaneously be a good American and a good Jew.
The eventual disappearance of Jewish institutions in this country, except in the religious field, had been predicted by George Backer, president of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He set the time for such disappearance at “the point at which our democratic system approaches the ideal upon which it is founded.” He saw as an ultimate goal the hope that Jewish institutions “may disappear into their parallel participants in the general field.”
Dr. Rosen declared that the Jews must fight the idea of emigration and insecurity, but must nevertheless investigate any potential outlet. He cited the economic plight of the Jews in Poland, contrasting it with potentialities in Biro-Bidjan.
“The economic structure of the life of our people in Eastern Europe is neither safe nor sane,” he asserted. “Too many are engaged in petty trades and a disproportional number in the so-called intellectual professions. But Biro-Bidjan is a shining example of difference. After fifteen years of reconstruction work there is no more a specifically Jewish problem in Russia.”
This does not mean, he explained, that Russia is the millennium, for there is plenty of room for improvement and the living standard is still low, but the Jew, he said, is engaged in the same pursuits and occupations as the other people, without discrimination.
Branding as a libel the statement that the Russian revolution had been made by Jews for Jews, Dr. Rosen said the Jews, mostly engaged in petty trade, suffered far more than any other element of the population from the revolution. He praised the Russian Government, which recognized the Jewish problem as a “State problem” and as such the duty of the State.
He praised the work of the Joint Distribution Committee and American Society for Jewish Farm Settlement in Russia, which operate through the Agro-Joint, declaring the improvements it had brought about were “permanent, not palliatives,” and adding that through the Government’s cooperation the activities had outgrown expectations.
Felix M. Warburg, who presided, said that in Europe, particularly Poland, American Jewry was known as “big brothers.” He said that conditions today were complicated, forcing “the backwash of what is happening abroad to touch our shores.” Although immigration had been reduced to a minimum, he declared, it had set in again as result of the outlawing of the Jews in Germany.
Justice Rosenman said there was room in Judaism for both assimilationist and anti-assimilationist. “There are not approximately four and a half million Jews in America,” he said. “It is reasonable to expect, at least within the next few generations, that neither a complete exodus to Palestine nor complete assimilation will cause the Jews to disappear from the American scene.
“A large portion will continue observance of their religion. Others will continue in varying degrees loyalty to language, literature and customs, tradition and culture. In all this they are no different from other religious or ethnic minority groups which compose the pattern of American life.”
Turning to the place of Jews in American democracy, he warned that “restriction of minority rights in the United States is not merely a Jewish problem,” but “it is dangerous enough to American liberalism and institutions and as such is an American as well as a Jewish problem.”
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.
