COMBAT ANTI-SEMITISM

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 73, 15 January 1947, Page 7

COMBAT ANTI-SEMITISM

CHRISTIAN CHURCHES OF AMERICA Unless the Christian Churches of America rise up to combat anti-Sem-itism, this country will “crumble and disintegrate” like ancient Egypt, Babylon, the Roman Empire of the Caesars, medieval Spain, Czarist Russia and Hitler’s Germany according to the Committee on the Christian Approach to the Jews of the Home Mission Council of North America. The Council with headquarters here, represents home mission interests of 23 denominations, states a message from New York. Those nations, said a statement by the committee, rose to power and to a relatively high degree of culture and civilisation, only to “totter and fall.” In each case, the statement said, such disintegration was preceded if not actually caused by a period of anti-Jewish prejudice and persecution. “But if America through its churches,” the statement added, “is able to combat and to prevent the encroaching anti-Semitism which now threatens, and instead succeeds in establishing friendly relations,

goodwill and co-operation between Jews and Christians, America may save its soul and assure its future, as well as lead the world out to a new day of neighbourliness which shall include all peoples.”

The committee statement described the United States as the “centre of gravity” of world Jewry. Numerically, Russia is a close second while Palestine runs a “poor third.” “Under thbse circumstances,” the statement continues, “American Jewry will probably determine the future trend if not the destiny of world Jewry. But what American Jewry will think and do is largely contingent on what Christian America thinks and does regarding the Jews’ will and can be determined by the churches. >

“When Hitler came to power there were 16,000,000 to 17,000,000 Jews in the world. Of those, some 6,000,000 men, women and children were exterminated by starvation, gassing and cremation and unspeakable sadism. Of the 11,000,000 Jews now alive in the world, over 5,000,000 live in the U.S.A. One of every two Jews in the world today is our neighbour here in the U.S.A. New York City has one in every five Jews of the world and almost five times as many as in all of Palestine or in Great Britain. There are 132 cities in the U.S.A. each with 2,0,00 or more Jews.