The American Jewish Congress has suspended its activities due to a lack of funds, confirmed its president, Richard Gordon.
Rumors of the advocacy group’s demise have abounded for months as reports stated it had lost about 90 percent of its approximately $24 million endowment in the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme. The AJCongress (as it’s known) had reported a fall in membership and donations even before suffering this major financial setback though.
The closure of one of the world’s oldest and most outspoken Jewish service organizations is a huge loss for the Jewish establishment.
“The demise of the American Jewish Congress should be an occasion for mourning,” writes Jerome A. Chanes, an author on Jewish affairs. “But more important, it should be an occasion for remembering and reconnecting with the oft-forgotten ideals and values that it helped introduce into Jewish communal life. Who will teach us how to say what we need to say and how to do what we need to do?”
The organization was born in Philadelphia’s historic Independence Hall in 1918, when leaders within the American Jewish community convened to prepare a unified position to present at the Paris Peace Conference. The founders wanted to ensure that European Jews, whose lives were equally disrupted by World War I, were given a democratic voice at Versailles.
Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, future Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis were among the delegates selected by more than 350, 000 Jews to attend that first Congress.
The group’s main concern was always securing “the fundamental rights to which Jews and men and women of all faiths are entitled,” but it was also a strong advocate for the establishment of a Jewish state and pioneered the use of the courts to defend Jewish rights.
Never afraid to take strong positions, the organization often separated itself from popular Jewish opinions. In the 1930s, the AJCongress was the first to declare a boycott on all Nazi goods, much to the protest of other Jewish organizations. After the war, the group was instrumental in rehabilitating European Jews and supported a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one. The group shifted its focus to defending human rights under the first amendment in the 1960s, but it did so from a legal stance rather than a social one. It has since been involved in countless civil rights and religious freedom cases, quickly garnering a reputation as the lawyer for Jewish-American interests.
The AJCongress was also the first to guarantee equal rights to its female members, and established the Commission for Women’s Equality in 1984. Much of the Commission’s recent work concentrated on issues stemming from research that reveals Ashkenazi Jewish women are more prone to the gene mutations that cause breast and ovarian cancer.
The long-term future of the AJCongress remains unclear. Gordon did tell The Jerusalem Post that they had some money in the bank, but that restrictions in the organization’s constitution prevented him from accessing the funds at the moment. He is hoping to merge with the American Jewish Committee, and has yet to formally announce the AJCongress’ suspension.
