An Israeli sociologist and educator declared here last night that Israel was “heading” toward closing the social gap between Jews of European origin and those who came from Arab and Asian countries.
“But we are not there yet,” Dr. Chaim Adler told some 1,000 persons attending the 35th convention of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW). The four-day convention, which ended today, also marked the beginning of the 90th anniversary of the NCJW, the oldest Jewish women volunteer organization in the U.S. Barbara Mandel, of Cleveland, was installed today to a two-year term as NCJW president, succeeding Shirley Leviton who ended her four-years as president.
Adler, who is director of the NCJW’s Institute for Innovation and Education at the School of Education of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said indications of the closing of the social gap are that the differences in family size between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews have disappeared and that the disparities in education are “shrinking.”
He said he hoped that Israeli Ashkenazim and Sephardim will soon achieve the same situation as Jews from Eastern Europe and Germany have in the U.S. where the gap that once existed between them is no longer there.
But Adler said, there is a new “urgency” because the ethnic split in Israel has been introduced into the country’s political disputes. The institution headed by Adler was established by the NCJW to develop, implement and evaluate programs for the disadvantaged in Israel.
At a dinner Friday night, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, said that the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism has been used to deny Israel the “legitimate rights of self-defense.” She said the “obnoxious phrase Zionism is racism” symbolized the agreement of African countries to support the Arabs against Israel in return for Arab support against South Africa.
Kirkpatrick said the UN political system protects some countries against censure while subjecting others, “Israel is the principal example,” to continuing censure. She charged that there is a “terrible double standard” on human rights in the UN in which nations of the Soviet bloc, Africa, except South Africa, and Asia are protected from criticism while Latin American countries and “especially Israel” have no such protection.
“Israel has been the object of so many human rights actions that it takes … computers to keep track,” she said.
DANGERS FACING ISRAEL AND WORLD JEWRY
Leviton told the delegates at the opening dinner last Thursday night that the NCJW faces issues today that “are not new to us but represent struggles we thought had been concluded.
“When we hear Zionism called racism and see Israel isolated in the halls of the UN; when we find the intimate bonds that tie the U.S. to Israel strained, how can we rest secure that the Jewish State is indeed in safe harbor? And when we hear of the persecution of our sisters and brothers in the Soviet Union and in Ethiopia, in Syria and Iraq, can we believe that Jews anywhere can afford to stand idly by?”
DOMESTIC ISSUES CITED
On the domestic scene, Leviton noted that when President Reagan calls 1983 the year of the Bible, “can we believe that American democracy rests on the principle of separation of church and state?” She also scored the Reagan Administration’s programs on such traditional NCJW concerns as women, children and youth and the elderly.
She criticized in particular what she called the threat to “a woman’s constitutional right to reproductive freedom;” the decrease in social spending and changes in the child labor laws which, she said, would “leave 14 and 15 year-old working in unsafe environments. ” Many of these issues were discussed at workshops during the convention.
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.
