Rabbi Israel Miller, president of the American Zionist Federation, will open his organization’s second national convention here Saturday night with a call for a massive campaign for the Jackson Amendment to the East-West Trade Act and against commercial trade agreements by the US with the USSR. He will also call on President Nixon to make “public protestation against this immoral head tax now,” so that the Soviet Union will realize the depth of his concern and that of the American community with this unjust decree.
The AZF leader, also says, in remarks prepared for delivery, that the Zionist movement cannot rest “unless our brethren in the Soviet Union and our cruelly oppressed brothers and sisters in Syria are granted similar opportunities for freedom and fulfillment.” In discussing the condition of American Jewry today, one of the themes of the conclave, Rabbi Miller will tell the more than 500 delegates expected to attend the convention that “our greatest concern should be not with the miniscule number of Jews who mouth the discredited anti-Israel rhetoric of the Radical Left, but with the many, many thousands who simply do not care.”
In his speech Rabbi Miller also states that Zionists cannot rest in their efforts until the problem of the absorption of Soviet and Syrian emigrants into Israel is solved, and “the closing of the housing, education and social gap of those who emigrated to Israel in the 1950’s is solved.” Noting that since the last convention, the AZF had made “an impressive beginning,” he calls on Zionists “to build upon this beginning and to make an impact upon the quality of American Jewish life.”
Rabbi Miller also points out that “despite the halt in any serious effort to effect negotiations because of the dastardly acts of murder and attempted murder by the El Fatah-Black September terrorists backed by Arab governments, Israel’s tenacity in its search for peace has been vindicated, and its safety and security is not a matter of dally headlines. Never in its twenty-five years of existence has Israel been as secure as it is presently.”
At the convention, special commissions will meet to examine ways in which new public affairs programs can be presented: to keep up the pressure for the release of Soviet Jews who wish to emigrate to Israel; to combat Arab terrorism; and to expand the work of the Zionist movement on the grass roots level of American Jewish community life.
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.
