A Conservative and a Reform rabbi supplied the formal participation of the American Jewish community in President Nixon’s second inaugural ceremonies Saturday and Sunday. Before the swearing in of the President for his second term yesterday on the steps of the Capitol, Rabbi Seymour Siegel, professor of theology at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, delivered the invocation. His remarks, the shortest of the four delivered by the participating Protestant, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Jewish clergymen, invoked a blessing in which Rabbi Siegel, using Hebrew interspersed with English translations, said “Blessed are you, King of the universe, who shares a portion of his glory with mortal man.”
In keeping with tradition. Rabbi Siegel wore a yarmulka and walked to the ceremony at the Capitol from a nearby hotel. He is believed to be the first rabbi not of the Reform branch of Judaism ever to participate in the inauguration ceremonies. President Truman became the first President to invite a rabbi to be an official participant when the late Rabbi Samuel Thurman of the United Hebrew Congregation of St. Louis joined in the Truman inauguration in 1949. Diplomats at the second Nixon inaugural yesterday included Israeli Ambassador and Mrs. Yitzhak Rabin and Minister and Mrs. Avner Idan.
Today in the White House, Rabbi Edgar F. Magnin, of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, who spoke at President Nixon’s first inaugural four years ago, spoke at the worship service which formally concluded the four-day second inauguration ceremonies. The other two clergymen who spoke were the Rev. Dr. Billy Graham and the Most Rev. Joseph L. Bernardin, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cincinnati.
NIXON ‘A BEAUTIFUL HUMAN BEING’
Addressing an audience of 300, the 82-year-old Rabbi Magnin praised Nixon as “a great leader–a beautiful human being” with whom “we shall go forward and nothing will stop us, with God’s help.” Departing from his-prepared text, Rabbi Magnin, whose forebears came to San Francisco from Panama more than 125 years ago, described the “new morality as the old immorality” and attacked “educated idiots” and “those who speak and write for-shock value.” He also denounced “totalitarianism in any form.”
In his prepared text, he spoke of Nixon as “a modern Joseph” and emphasized “Now is the time to build up.” Vice President Spiro T. Agnew later described Rabbi Magnin’s talk as “magnificent.” Rabbi Magnin appeared without a yarmulka. He told a reporter afterwards that he never wears one “except when I am in an Orthodox shul.”
Among the dozen media representatives invited to attend was the Washington Bureau Chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Guests at Vice President Agnew’s reception at the Smithsonian Institution Thursday night, which opened the inaugural festivities, included Rabbi Abraham M. Hershberg of Mexico City, President of the Union of Rabbis of Latin America.
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.
