Jews Urged to Participate in Anti-nuclear Movement

Appeals for greater Jewish involvement in the growing movement against nuclear weapons were aired this week by rabbis and lay leaders.

The appeals were made at a two-day conference on the danger of nuclear war, sponsored by the Emet Foundation, a private foundation in Los Angeles dedicated to the advancement of arts, sciences and humanities. Some 140 people attended the conference, which ended Tuesday and which coincided with the opening of the Second United Nations Special Session on Disarmament.

The participants represented a broad spectrum of Jewish denominational affiliations and political views, but appeared to share a sense of urgency regarding the nuclear threat.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg, executive director of the National Jewish Resource Center, which includes a center for Holocaust research, said in an address to the group that the post-Holocaust generation must “have the courage to project the Jewish experience … as a guideline – out of being faithful to our own experience and out of responding to our own experience – to have the courage then to speak up with and to the rest of the world.” He said that Jews can contribute to the movement a traditional Messianic concept of the struggle between life and death that envisions the triumph of the former, as human beings grow and develop in the image of God.

But he added that Jews can also “offer a note of realism that grows out of the particularity of our own experience.” Greenberg suggested that advocates of a nuclear freeze frequently undermine their cause by speaking in sweeping terms that equate the two superpowers and ignore concrete obstacles to nuclear reduction which are posed by the Soviet Union.

“When we call for nuclear disarmament, I think we have to confront honestly the moral achievement of the nuclear balance of terror, and therefore, to make clear to people that we understand and share their legitimate concern that in trying to move away from the precipice, we’re not ignoring any of the serious issues that they themselves are oppressed by or disturbed by,” Greenberg said. He suggested a buildup of conventional arms “to preserve the balance during the transition.” However, most participants supported a bi-lateral nuclear freeze, whatever the tone of the approach.