Interdating and intermarriage, the dilemma of religious identity and practices of the Jewish college student away from home, and the general breakdown of values in our times, occupied the attention of 300 Jewish women leaders assembled here for an all-day seminar which was sponsored by the National Women’s League of the United Synagogue, largest women’s synagogue organization in the world.
The three principal participants — a psychiatrist, an editor and a rabbi — in a seminar devoted to “Threats Confronting the Jewish Family Today” agreed that “family and religion are the two mainstays of security for the Jewish child and that school and synagogue alone are incapable of providing a proper substitute for the warmth of family living so necessary to the rearing of a generation of Jewish youth which can be expected to continue in the traditions of its faith.”
Dr. Ira Eisenstein, editor of the Jewish Reconstructionist, Dr. Hector Ritey, medical director of the Metropolitan Center for Mental Health, and Rabbi Theodore Friedman, a former president of the Rabbinical Assembly of America, stressed that the emotional factors engendered by the closely-knit family often provided the vital ingredient required to impel the Jewish child to continue to live according to the traditions in which he was brought up.
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.
