Dr. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, told the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations today that hopes for an early Israeli-Arabian settlement were fading and that the Mideast problem might be back on the United Nations Security Council agenda next month. He added that world Jewry “must remain mobilized in the face of an international political situation fraught with difficulty for Israel.”
In a review of European problems, he said little improvement could be expected in regard to maintenance of Jewish identity and development of a Jewish cultural and religious life by Soviet Jews as long as present Soviet-Israel relations remained unchanged. He declared that the “anti-Semitic” propaganda drive in Poland must be condemned though the Polish Jewish population was small and the danger of physical attack against the Jewish community was minimal. In other East European countries, he added, the position of the Jewish communities remained unchanged, although some liberalization of government policy could now be expected in Czechoslovakia.
He predicted that the “right-wing” and “anti-Semitic” National Democratic Party in West Germany would gain a number of seats in coming elections to the West German Parliament and warned that the rise of the party was “a greater danger to German democracy and the Western alliance than to the Jewish community because the remaining number of German Jews is so small.”
He also urged that “everything should be done to rescue” the few thousand Jews left in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, saying those Jews were in “permanent danger” as long as the Arab-Israel conflict continued.
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.
