JUNE 4> 1965
THE CANADIAN JEWISH REVIEW
FROM THE CANADIAN JEWISH CONGRESS CONVENTION IN
MONTREAL
(Continued from Page Four) even desire to program Judaic learning into the total computer repertoire of philosophy, for example, was licking. It was this distinction between the technology of Jewish learning and of general learning, that would perpetuate the gap between the two. Thus the impoverishment of Jewish learning would become increasingly apparent unless a revolution in patterns of community fund-raising and spending developed.
COMPUTERS, AIR-SPACE
TECHNOLOGY S*CN AFFECTING JEWISH LIFE
Piece-meal, patchwork, and bargain-priced panaceas will never cure American Jewish education of its basic ills while total annual expenditure on schooling equals only 10% of the real needs. This was the conclusion reached by Dr. Judah Shapiro in summarizing the session on the strengths and weaknesses of the Jewish educational system. While $50,000,000 was spent annually on North American Jewish education, he said, his calculations proved a system rendering proper service could absorb half a billion dollars annually.
Dr. Shapiro is executive secretary of the Foundation for Jewish culture of New York, and an anthropologist by training. He outlined several radical points of departure. Mobility had begun to dislocate the traditional geographic patterns of American Jewry, he said. No longer could reliance be placed on community schools built by a stable community, to meet the requirements of the builder's own children.
The new technology and airspace industries were accelerating development of communities too rapidly for conventional methods of school growth. Capital needs in new Jewish communities outstripped the financial capabilities of the new, young, Jewish, scientific, technical and academic workers located there.
Implication of this for the American Jewish community was that local control over educational funds, and option as to their investment, must give way to national controls more responsive to changing national needs. The grandparents rather than parents must build the schools and these should be built not where the funds are raised but where the children live.
Mr. Lapin took sharp issue with other speakers when he decried exclusive stress on enhanced Jewish education as a total solution to all Jewish problems. Education alone was no substitute for a basic reshaping of the values required to sustain Canadian Jewry.
A Vancouver plant virologist struck a rare note of confidence when he challenged statistics on intermarriage usually cited to predict the inevitable doom of Canadian Jewry as a cultural entity.
Dr. Marvin Weintraub, of the University of British Columbia, maintained that published reports of rates of intermarriage attaining 50% in some provinces, proved on examination, to be based on a total of two marriages, involving one single Christian in the four partners.
Cautioning against hasty credence in Prof. Gonick's portrayal of alienated Jewish youth, Dr. Weintraub charged that most figures on Jewish school attendance are meaningless since a basis of comparison is rarely given. A true study would show a cheering upward trend in attendance and depth of curriculum, be said.
Jewish youth and Jewish academic personnel on the university campus show more interest in Jewish life today than they have in the past, he asserted. Efforts to win over rebellious critics of society had failed in every age, Jewish intellectuals who shared Prof. Gonick's views would never be attracted to Jewish life because they chose to invent evidence, to defend their disinterest. As an example of this. Dr. Weintraub dted the disproportionately large involvement of Jewish youth and Rabbinical leaden in the US civil rights movement, s well-pnblithed fact which Prof. Gooick had deliberately ignored in his talk.
Sharply divergent views cm the religions colouring of Jewish community life were advanced by the spirits*! leader of Toronto's Sfcaard S>myim Synagogue, Dr. Walter S. Wontbur-ger, and Mr. Lapin. Noting the degree of guilt associated with leaving the Jewish fold, Rabbi Wanxmrger
maintained that this proved how universally the nature of Jewish identity was accepted.
Ethnic loyalty and religious commitment are combined in Jewuhness, and any attempt to transform the community into a theologkally-bascd Judaism must fail. A program for Jewish survival that stresses one quality to the exclusion of the other ignores the truths of Jewish historic experience, he insisted.
The Toronto spiritual leader preferred to see Canadian Jewry in terms of a "community of fate and faith" conferring on all its members a sense of "fulfilment of a religious vocation and destiny". Today's secular Jew who engages in Jewish communal activities after shedding his spiritual commitment, is merely performing an empty "secular ritual of Jewish self-identification," he said.
This religiously based formulation was condemned by Mr. Lapin as constituting a Christian format in its stress on faith and ritual observances. Judaism had a much broader meaning for present-day Jewry, he said. Its survival was conditional on reintegrating the tenets of Judaism as a total way of life, embracing secular as well as religiously-oriented activities.
Exploring the defects of Jewish education, Winnipeg's Peretz School principal, S. Heilik, urged the Canadian Jewish Congress to impose national patterns of discipline on Jewish schools throughout Canada. This must be done, he insisted, while avoiding ideological conformity. It was the presence of this sense of cultural discipline that formed the success of Latin American Jewish schools. Its absence accounted for the comparative failure of United States Jewish schooling.
Although Canadian Jewish schools are rated higher than the American synagogue-dominated system, they still lack curricular discipline, financial stability, and suffer from the nonprofessional status of the teaching profession, said Mr. Heilik.
Presiding at the session was Prof. Jacob Finkleman, Q.C., of the Uni-versity of Toronto.
CONTEMPORARY ASPECTS OF OUR SPIRITUAL AND CULTURAL LIFE
Prof. Ben Lappin of the School of Social Work, at the University of Toronto, spoke on "Contemporary Aspects Of Our Spiritual And Cultural Life":
The Jewish congregations arc emerging as the new folk organizations in Canadian Jewry, where services with their responsive greetings and familiar songs are geared to a collective affirmation of group identity rather than individual meditation, where rabbis are expected to function as folk leaders rather than as teachers or scholars or spiritual symbols.
The synagogues seek to provide a spectrum of activities ranging from prayer to recreation in an effort to offer the all-embracing cultural association which the Eastern European Jew receives from his community.
The ideological groups which flourished until recently in Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg have lost out to the � synagogues. This was due to the fact that the folk organizations have never really been successful in extending their secular philosophies into the religious realm. The synagogue on the other hand has managed to move from its purely religious position to embrace secular activities. For much the same reason the YAi.HAj in this country have failed to rival the synagogues as folk organizations.
"The overriding concern on the part of all who identify as Jews is the survival of the community on this continent. We eagerly read the predictions of the scholars on this score like a fever chart of a patient passing through a crisis."
Prof. Lappin contrasted the findings of the Sklare-Vosk Rfverton Study that 95 per cent of their adolescent children interviewed in a medium-sized American dty wants Jews to remain a distinct group with the findings of Congress Research Director Louis Rosenberg, showing that between 1931 and 1963 intermarriage among Jews in Canada has risen from 3.8 to 18.5 per cent.
The consuming interest in these soundings by experts seems to have replaced the spontaneous determination of an ethnic group to take hold of its destiny regardless of what verdict history may bold in store for us. This signified a kind of wavering and loss of authority to matters relating to the fate of Jewish Life.
It is necessary to seek usn insight into ethnic forces that may lead to � messre of restored self-confidence, a pre-reqoisite to a revitalised Jewish
One of the root sources of the mm of helplessness in Canada lies in the fact that we remain closely bound to the East European moral df organised Jewish life. The problem, he said, resides in the community structure and not in the cultural tradition we have inherited from East European Jewry.
Through the interplay of random forces rather than through premeditated planning, the Jewish community is stumbling towards a way of life that is compatible with the larger society around us. We are working out a way whereby at the level of in* dividual behaviour there is fall freedom for involvement, for participation � in short, for integration.
However, at the institutional level we are trying to develop restraining organizations which attempt to secure the individual to his heritage. The effect is one of a person moving and mingling freely, yet tied to his group by an extended cord so to speak that is capable of exerting tension and at times restricting his movement should he try to stray too far afield from his ethnic group.
Our organizations exert varying degrees of restraint, ranging from the maximal influence of the Hebrew day school to a Jewish bowling league which exacts a nominal cultural affiliation.
Whether these institutions are strong enough to counter-balance as-similatory tendencies, our organizations are performing a very useful service in this respect as they provide avenues of expression and modes of
association in Jewish terms for hundreds of volunteers across Canada.
This ferment of voluntary effort, resides in the soda] agencies, in the central planning councils and in the fund-raising bodies. The involvement in these activities is based essentially on the service ideal to which we as an ethnic group are so heavily committed on this continent.
But the service ideal is founded on giving and we cannot replace Jewish giving with Jewish living. These institutions have by their inherent nature not come to grips with the spiritual void in our communal life and so North American Jewry has turned in large numbers to the synagogue.
The service organizations and the synagogue, are two examples of the restraining effect at the institutional level which provide thousands of people with a Jewish ethnic identity who as individuals are integrated 'Canadians.
Do not conclude from this that we are in every sense a flourishing community . . . There is a prevailing sense of pessimism because neither the service groups nor the congregations nor our other organizations have evinced the power to attract many of our thinkers, scholars, artists, and social scientists.
The issue is not simply one of repatriating a number of recalcitrant prima donnas. Without the trained mind of the social scientist the disciplined search of the scholar or the vision and imagination of the artist,
(Continued on Page Six)
FOft YOUR SHOPPINQ IN PARIS
FRtDDY
PARIS
World-renowned TAX-FREE Gift Shopping Center
all brands of Hie finttt French
PERFUMES GLOVES-BAGS-TIES
UMBRELLAS � SCARVES � LACOSTE SHIRTS COGNACS AND HUNDREDS OF UNUSUAL GIFTS
40% DISCOUNT
On oil merchandise (perfumes included) not sufcieet to French Government Price Controls.
10 RUE AUBER � PARIS
Next to American Express (Opera) � RIC. 78-08, 63-41 FAST RELIABLE Open Daily 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Atoll Order Department without interruption
ATTENTION !
WHILE IN PARIS ALL SUBSCRIBERS AND READERS OF THE
ARE ENTITLED TO ADDITIONAL EXTRA DISCOUNT UPON PRESENTATION OF THIS CERTIFICATE.
YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED
bur from rrri�w adrartimri, s�y' "I taw your *4 in Ott C**sdi*a J twit k jtcvttv".
What is the A. B. C. or Audit Bureau of
Circulations, and what is its importance?
A. The A. B. C. is a voluntary association of major publishers, advertisers, national and local; and advertising agencies, working together to police circulation claims, and to translate them into facts.
Q. Why are circulation facts so important?
A. Circulation figures are the only honest basis on which print advertising is sold and purchased. Publishers base their prices for advertising on the amount of their circulation, and its quality. An advertiser buys circulation. A. B.C. circulation facts tell him the exact amount at any time.
Q. How does an advertiser know that this is really so?
A. A. B.C. publishers keep exact records of all circulation receipts for subscriptions and single copy sales. These can tell him, too, whether the circulation is sold with-out a premium, or with one, to induce payment; or whether the circulation is composed of membership m an organization; or whether it is sold on its merit alone. Was the subscription sold on a special rate? Was it paid by mail directly to the publisher, or to an agent? These are just some of the categories of subscription payments which are recorded.
Q. Why are some of these answers so important?
A. Sometimes these answers can tell an advertiser whether the subscriber needs to be coaxed mto continuing, or starting. Are subscribers voluntarily buying the publication? Do they need a cut-rate or an added attraction to keep on?
Q. How are the figures checked?
A. The publisher checks his figures, and reports them twice a year to the head office of the A. B. C. These are audited once a year by travelling A. B. C. auditors, who check the names, the receipts, the printing invoices, the bank deposits, the paper used, the ink used, the postage receipts � <dlof these show the number of copies printed or mailed; and paid for. If an A3.C. field auditor goes to work for a publication whose books he has audited within a year or so, there is an automatic re-audit by another auditor. An auditor does not audit the figures of any publication for more than two consecutive years.
Q. Does the A. B. C. allow past-due subscriptions?
A. The A. B. C. rules state that all subscriptions up for renewal must be paid within three months of the expiry date. The publisher must keep track of each one. These are considered paid, but not completely so, until paid in full, for the term to come.
Q. Are new subscriptions considered as paid?
A. Not until payment is received for the term hi advance.
Q. What does this cost the publisher?
A. The publisher considers the membership as his investment to protect the investment of each advertiser. The publisher pays quarterly dues; the cost of the auditing done in his office, by the hour; and the cost of checking done further, at the A. B. C. head office. If further checking is needed, the publisher pays that cost, too. An auditor spends several days m the Canadian Jewish Review office each year.
Q. Are these the only costs?
A. The greatest cost to the publisher is to see that the records are kept in order and up to date. The Canadian Jewish Review addressograph plates are posted to show the date and method and amount of payment; and the date of the subscription, and the length of its term. A publication must carry on the address label all information that the auditor would need to guide him in checking. A publication which sells subscriptions on short-term, or with a premium, or in combination with other publications, for instance, will carry all that information and more, on the address label, coded m some way.
Q. What do A. B. C. reports and statements say about the Canadian Jewish Review?
A. They tell at a quick glance the provincial break-down; the amount sold m a period; that the Canadian Jewish Review never sells a subscription on a premium; never with a cut rate; never jointly with another publication; never as part of membership in an organization.
The Canadian Jewish Review is sold on its own merits, and always has been. It has no affiliation with any organization.
A.B.C. reports and statements supply facts to advertiser*. These facts need to be known for advertising money to be spent wisely and honestly.
A. B. C. publications can never guarantee results. They do guarantee readership.
The Ca��dk" Jewish Review is in its 22nd year of supplying facts to advertisers, investing to protect investments.
The Canadian Jewish Review is soli the only pubttcatioa reaching the general Jewish community in Canada, which can provide audited, paid, A. B. C. circulation facts and figures for the protection of each advertiser.