Jewish Post, Indianapolis, Marion County, 31 March 1972 — Page 24

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THE JEWISH POST AND OPINION

Friday, March 31, 1972

Fund-Raising Destroying Jewish Life: Polish

CINCINNATI — The charge that the American synagogue is being manipulated for other causes was made here by Rabbi David Polish, in the founder’s day address at Hebrew Union College — Jewish Institute of Religion. The president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis asserted that, “Power and influence in Jewish life have

been transferred with increasing acceleration into the hands of well-intentioned and devoted Jews who have the capability of destroying American Jewry out of sheer love for the Jewish

people.”

HE SAID the reason is fund-

raising.

“. . . increasingly the synagogue has become an object of manipulation in which it is

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seen by realistic men who are under relentless fiscal pressure primarily as a conduit for fundraising.” Continuing, he said: “Its intrinsic merit as a storehouse of the Jewish spirit may perhaps be taken for granted by them but they do not speculate or worry about how that storehouse is to be preserved. When they are called on to lend a hand to both the practical and moral issues confronting the synagogue, they plausibly plead the consuming demands of major causes. Thus with the best intentions in the world, they are contributing to conditions which inexorably reduce the synagogue to a functionary for other causes. They sit on boards of congregations and see to it that when the word goes out from a central office, those congregations together with their rabbis fall in line.” THE RESULT of this situation, according to Rabbi Polish is that “the synagogue will become used up, depleted, lacking in all purpose except, with diminishing returns, to fulfill pressing financial needs, and the wonder is that hard-headed realists cannot see this com-

ing.”

He did not hesitate to call a spade a spade. “Nowhere have we heard,” he charged, “a single responsible communal leader, lay or professional, say, ‘Jews, we are using the synagogue. What are we doing to preserve it?’ ” He quoted one Jewish leader by name, Paul Zuckerman, who recently was elevated as national chairman of the United Jewish Appeal. “IN HIS acceptance speech as the national chairman of the United Jewish Appeal, Paul Zuckerman laid down a formula for eliciting greater financial support from young Jews. He said, ‘Allow me to d^aw your attention to the paper millionaires project. There are men in every major city who have made a considerable amount of money through stock vehicles but have never been a part of the Jewish community. Dr. Nesher’s team finds them by thoroughly researching through the public records. This project does not only raise money, it literally makes Jews out of men we weren’t reaching before.’ ” Rabbi Polish said he did “not challenge the fund-raising aspects of the formula. But if

Mr. Zuckerman is right about the procedure for making Jews, why not close down our schools, our congregations, our seminaries? Why not eliminate our publishing houses? Why not send our scholars, teachers, our Eli Wiesels out to pasture and use the sure-fire way of making Jews by raising their financial sights?” HE THEN conceded that he is sure “that the Paul Zuckermans of the Jewish community do not mean it in quite that way but by tneir strategy they create a situation which supports their unspoken proposition.” The Highland Park, 111. rabbi then directed his attack against the way in which the Jewish organizations honor people. “. . . shouldn’t it concern us all that with unwavering consistency Jewish and non-Jewish tycoons, politicians, and labor leaders, non-Jewish generals and government officials and even Christian clergymen are honorees at civic functions while not a single scholar, not a single great teacher is given recognition by those agencies and those people who predicate their campaigns on the moral foundations of a just and righteous Jewish people?” HE ANSWERED his own question: “If one observes the Jewish scene carefully, one will find that design or fortuitously (and there is nothing fortuitously in the sub-conscious) religious leadership is given increasingly short shrift within the infrastructure of Jewish life.” Rabbi Polish said that “change will not come about unless the entire structure of Jewish religious life begins to assert itself (and) to enter into creative moral tension with the so-called secular sector of the Jewish community. To do this, we will have to initiate processes of our own instead of being reflexive reactors to'outer stimuli.” He then took issue with the prevailing mood of ethnicity in the Jewish community. “ONE OF THE issues which such a synagogue must raise with the Jewish power structure is that American Jewry is not merely an ethnic entity. We must assume our share of responsibility in the creation of this error by our insistence in an earlier generation that we were only a religious or creedal fellowship. At one time we

dramatized our desire to be like all Americans by belonging to congregations and by pursuing our private lives as citizens. Now we express our new adaptive powers by ethnicizing ourselves like all Americans.” Rabbi Polish saw danger in this transition. “If we take on this identity, then it must follow that the synagogue can have only the most peripheral meaning in our lives and can at best serve as a colorful but harmless adjunct to an ethnic culture. An oncoming reversal might be in the offing, he said, asserting that “We may be entering upon a time when Jews in this land will be seeking out their synagogues not only for ethnic identification but for spiritual strength in trying times.” IN THIS connection, he made a prediction. “We will not again in our time see a Jew on the Supreme Court bench, a Jew as this nation’s representative at the United Nations, and those who cavalierly abdicated a so-called Jewish seat on the Bench should ponder the symbolism and implications of these and other facts.” Pursuing this theme h e stated: “I do not shrink from linking religion and especially Jewish religion, with a time of troubles, with what is sardonically called ‘fox-hole religion.’ The essence of religion, even when it is joyous and ecstatic, is man’s response to trouble in its every aspect, the crisis of the individual daily facing annihilation, the crisis of the group daily facing ultimate issues of destiny. So we will be returning, not necessarily by a rational choice, but through the compulsions of history, to a synagogue. It may not be the synagogue of our fathers or of our own earlier years, but it will be an organic relative of that synagogue. New forms will emerge and old forms will return and suddenly appear to be very much in style. We must work very hard at critically examining the content of our worship and producing new prayer books, but eventually this conscious and even self-conscious process will be replaced by a burst of spontaneous creativity which will be as authentic as technological inventiveness is today.” RABBI POLISH did not close (Continued on Next Page)

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