Dr. Martin Rosenbluth, chairman of the German Jewish Representative Committee, an affiliate of the World Jewish Congress, has made public “a Statement on Behalf of German Jewry,” criticizing Dr. Louis Finkelstein, president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, for stating in a letter to the New York Times that “from a voluminous personal correspondence,” he knew that many German Jews, Themselves the victims of severest persecution, still felt that in the war their country was in the right.”
Dr. Rosenbluth points out that “even if Dr. Finkelstein should be able to produce an isolated statement or two from some disturbed individuals, a student of his standing should know better than to generalize in such an irresponsible way, libeling the German Jewish community and in doing so casting discredit on the entire Jewish people, whom he is supposed to serve as a religious leader.”
Dr. Finkelstein is also severely criticized in an editorial in the Aufbau, German-Jewish publication. “We are utterly at a loss to explain how Dr. Finkelstein could find evidence for such allegations in his, as he terms it, ‘voluminous correspondence,’ ” the editorial says. “Granted that one perverted and feeble-minded German Jew once said something to this effect, we know for sure–from vast experience and a correspondence which truly might be termed voluminous–that there is not a single German Jew in his full senses who, since the outbreak of Nazism, has not striven to disassociate himself and his Jewish community from Nazi-Germany,” the editorial declares.
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.
