20 Young Non-jews from West Germany to Visit the U.S. to Gain Insights into the American Jewish Comm

Twenty young men and women from the Federal Republic of Germany will spend two weeks in the United States visiting Jewish homes and institutions, meeting with Jewish leaders and young people, and learning about American Jewish communal, religious, and cultural life, it was announced by the American Jewish Committee. Most of the 20 are non-Jewish and were bom after the end of World War II.

The tour will begin April 18 and end May 1 it is part of a two-year-old exchange program, sponsored jointly by the AJCommittee and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a major West German research and educational organization under which young leaders from each nation visit each others’ countries.

Explaining the purposes of the program, Richard Weiss of Los Angeles, AJCommittee national chairman of the German-American Jewish Young Leadership Exchange Program, said that it was “designed to provide non-Jewish groups from the Federal Republic of Germany with insights into the American Jewish community’s position in the United States, and to provide young leaders of the American Jewish community with on objective, view of the ‘New Germany’ in order that the groups could develop on understanding of each other’s cultural, socioeconomic, and political life.”

The forthcoming visit, Weiss added, will “emphasize the United States as a democratic, pluralistic society in which the Jewish experience can be viewed as a microcosm of the way ethnic groups have flourished in America.”

Participants in this spring’s mission will visit New York, Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In New York the focus of most of the group’s visits and meetings will be on Jewish history, demography, religious diversity, and socio-economic patterns; in Washington the stress will be on Jews and the political system; in Chicago, on Jews and ethnics; and in Los Angeles on the Federation experience. This spring’s tour will be of the second exchange group to come to the United States. In June, a second group of young Americans will travel to West Germany.