Jews v. Israel

Of all the painful thorns in their international rosebush, none makes Israelis so sore as a group of highly vocal American Jews known as the American Council for Judaism, Inc. Strongly anti-Zionist, the A.C.J., under the leadership of Lessing J. Rosenwald, onetime Sears, Roebuck board chairman, supports the idea that Judaism and nationalism "are separate and distinct," and that U.S. Jews owe nothing more to Israel than to any other toddling nation.

With the hope that he might soften the A.C.J.--and loosen its tight pockets as well--Israel's canny Premier David Ben Gurion last month invited Lessing Rosenwald to Israel for a visit. Rosenwald happily accepted, provided that he and his wife be permitted to pay for their own transportation. After a twelve-day tour of Israel, Rosenwald returned to the U.S. impressed but not mollified.

"The impressions," he told an A.C.J. meeting in Manhattan last week, "are very mixed. On the one hand Israel has offered a haven of refuge for hundreds of thousands who could not have found such a place in any other part of the world . . . On the other hand one sees the isolationism of Israel. For them the world is the boundaries of the Israeli borders. I found it difficult to explain how one could be enthusiastic about the State and disagree with Zionist ideology. To them, Jews who are in other parts of the world and who are in difficulty should receive no assistance other than to help them come to Israel--all else is temporizing. It is difficult for them to conceive how a Jew can live a normal life, be free and independent, outside of Israel. I do not think they can understand how I, a Jew, can love the United States as they do Israel. They cannot understand a Jew integrating himself into the fabric of any nation other than Israel.

"Generally speaking, one can say that in Israel the people have little regard for religion. I think there are more synagogues in Jenkintown, Pa. [Rosenwald's home] than in Tel Aviv . . . One of the correspondents asked me if I was not afraid that through assimilation in the United States we would lose our Jewish consciousness. I said that I thought that it was far more likely that in Israel they would lose it in nationalism.

"I think it only fair ... to make it perfectly clear that nothing we saw or heard has altered in the slightest degree my opposition to the principles and practices of political Zionism."

Proof that Israel has in the U.S. more roses than thorns lay in Miami Beach, where some 2,000 U.S. and Canadian Jews gathered last week to kick off the 1957 Israel bond drive. The goal: $75 million.

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