Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and Rosicrucians gathered at the Hotel New Yorker over the week-end to begin a series of fourteen World Fellowship of Faiths meetings aimed at the formation of an International Parliament of Religions.
Yesterday the 400 representatives of the eleven great religions marched from Thirty-second street and Seventh avenue to the Hotel New Yorker attracting hundreds of curious passers-by by their variegated and multi-colored costumes.
The parade was led by the Aida quartet, four women in flowing white satin togas. Ruth St. Denis, famous danseuse, and Rabbi Sidney E. Goldstein of the Free Synagogue, marched along flanked by Pandit Shyama Shanker, Indian Hindu leader, and Sokel-ann Sasaki. Japanese Buddhist priest.
Last night Rabbi Louis I. Newman addressed the gathering in the grand ballroom of the Hotel New Yorker on “Merchants of Death.” In a scathing attack on munitions propaganda which several times evoked bursts of applause, Rabbi Newman castigated the “merchants of death who are responsible for most of the war scares of today.
“We must realize,” he declared, “that wars and imperialism must be curtailed by the readiness of each people to cooperate with others for the common international good. Only the pirates of finance and the military vultures who feed on the blood of the slain for their own aggrandizement are the gainers from strife on the battlefield.”
RABBI MENDES SPEAKS
On Saturday night when Rabbi H. Pereira Mendes of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue spoke on “The Spiritual Needs and Evils of Society,” he was greeted by the Hindu salute as he mounted to the platform. The Jainists, Christians, and Mohammedans rose, pressed their palms together, and repeated: “With my hand and my heart I salute the soul in you.”
“In Mosaic days,” he said, speaking haltingly, “the Hebrews practiced a religion of love. The Hebrew hated war. Moses preached that when the Hebrews built an altar they were to bring no iron near it, for iron is a symbol of war”
Rabbi Mendes, who was a member of the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, pleaded that the representatives “lift this world fellowship to a high plane of thought.”
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.
