Israeli: ‘No Future’ for U.S. Jews
While Israeli politicians showed up in record numbers this week at the annual assembly of North American Jewish charitable federations to laud the Jewish community for its fundraising efforts and to emphasize global Jewish unity, one top Israeli official took the occasion to insult Diaspora Jewry.
On the eve of the 75th annual General Assembly of United Jewish Communities, Ze’ev Bielski, chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel — one of two main recipients of the $340 million-plus raised by the federations’ Israel Emergency Campaign — told The Jerusalem Post that American Jews had “no future.”
“One day, the penny will drop for American Jews and they will realize they have no future as Jews in the U.S. due to assimilation and intermarriage,” Bielski said.
At a press conference here during the assembly, Bielski defended his statements, saying they had been taken out of context. “There was no intention to minimize the role of the Jewish federations,” he said, adding that he hoped to deepen the charities’ involvement in Israel.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
