Teen-age members of the Greater Miami Jewish Community Center agreed today that to be a good Jew, one must be observant, ethical, charitable and responsible to the community.
This was one of a series of conclusions reached at the seventh annual Teen-Age Conclave sponsored by the Center. Some 375 delegates from 31 teen-age clubs in Dade County took part. They also decided that pride of faith is not enough without deep knowledge of the Jewish faith and that adherence to one’s faith gives a feeling of security but there should also be ethics and standards along with faith.
The teen-agers agreed that religion belongs in the church, the synagogue and the home and that religious practices should be eliminated from the public schools. The young people added, however, that the schools should teach the Bible as literature and history, along with other major religious writings. They proposed that moral and ethical readings should be substituted for daily prayers in the schools, which is a widespread practice in Dade county schools.
They also asserted that in these times of great material success, people were not sufficiently concerned with the welfare of other people who have problems and that the idea of “promoting the general welfare” indicates a governmental responsibility for meeting the needs of older people, for example.
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.
