Zionist leaders got down to essentials on international Jewish problems today as the 28th World Zionist Congress entered its second day. Dr. Emanuel Neumann, the veteran American Zionist leader, called on the movement to fight what he called the legend that “we are guilty of uprooting a whole people (i.e., the Palestinians) from its land.” That claim, he said, was “as pernicious and possibly as harmful as the old legend of deicide.” Dr. Neumann pleaded with Jewish philanthropies to put greater stress on Jewish education in the diaspora.
Regretting “the steady growth of assimilation, the constant drift away from the Jewish fold culminating often in intermarriage,” Dr. Neumann asserted that “all we are doing does not begin to measure up to the task.” The 76-year-old leader said the solution was “to move our philanthropically minded Jews everywhere to devote enough of their resources to this crucial task.” Prof. Abraham Joshua Heschel of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America warned that the gull between halacha and modern Jewish life was widening and threatening world Jewry. There must be a synthesis, he said, of the moral and ethical teachings of the faith and its purely legal aspects.
Prof. Albert Memmi of the Sorbonne, the author of several books on Jewish liberation, demanded that the Zionist movement divorce itself from the Jewish religion. “The Jewish national movement,” he declared, “cannot be ruled by bodies and values which belong to a world which is no more.” Religion, Memmi said, had protected Jewry through the centuries, but it was now undeniable that there were millions of persons who consider themselves Jews but do not want religious solutions to their daily problems. “What would Orthodox Jewry do to those who have intermarried and to their children –excommunicate them?,” Memmi asked.
He also warned that youth was in revolt in Israel because the “Establishment” had refused to listen to it, and that social problems in Israel could be ignored only at the risk of internal explosion. Dr. Judah J. Shapiro of New York, head of the Labor Zionist Alliance, said Jewish educational programs must recognize the differences between various Jewish communities in the diaspora and within the United States itself. (See other Congress stories P. 2)
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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.
