Israel: After Zionism, What?

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Disappointed that the world's largest and most vigorous Jewish community—the 5,500,000 U.S. Jews—has sent practically no emigrants to help build the new Zion, Israel's Prime Minister Ben-Gurion stirred a storm when he bluntly told the 25th Zionist Congress in Jerusalem that from the time of Israel's establishment in 1948, "every religious Jew has daily violated the precepts of Judaism by remaining in exile."

Ben-Gurion's blast has touched off an embarrassed dispute among U.S. Jewish leaders about their relationship to Israel. First to react was Philadelphia-born Rabbi Israel Goldstein, 64, former president of the American Jewish Congress. Stung by Ben-Gurion's reproaches, Goldstein stayed on after last fortnight's congress, the first top-ranking U.S. Jew to settle in Israel. But in the U.S., liberal and conservative rabbis alike condemned Ben-Gurion's theology as "erroneous." The American Jewish Committee declared itself "grieved and shocked" by the suggestion that Jews have an obligation to emigrate to Israel. The anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism said: "Our nationality is American; our religion is Judaism. Our homeland is the U.S., and we reject the concept that all Jews outside Israel are in exile."

Last week Dr. Joachim Prinz, Rabbi Goldstein's successor as A.J.C. president, took the argument a long step farther. With the establishment of the Israeli state, Zionism has fulfilled its purpose and the Zionist movement itself should "dissolve," declared Prinz. Though he has been a lifelong Zionist himself, Prinz admitted that U.S. Jews and Israel have drifted apart, and that the Zionist movement "has not been able to move the young Jewish men and women of today."

The one tie that still binds U.S. Jewry to Israel, Rabbi Prinz pointed out, is an emotional concern which U.S. Jews have put in concrete form by contributing some $500 million to Israel in the last twelve years. But practically none of the money has been collected by the Zionist movement. Chief channel for U.S. Jewish aid to Israel: the United Jewish Appeal.

In place of old-fashioned Zionism, Prinz called for a broad new U.S. grouping that would accept "the principle of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism: 'We are a people, one people' "—whether in Israel or the U.S. This principle, said Prinz, "expresses a reality fully consistent with American democracy and our country's pluralistic society. It is a fact of life. It is how our neighbors feel about us. It is how we feel about ourselves."