Planning Jewish Life - an article in the Jewish paper C.V Zeitung
Planning Jewish Life - an article in the Jewish paper C.V Zeitung
Source: C.V Zeitung , 26 September 1935
These days we are at the end of a [Jewish] year and century. This is the end of a historical era. In the depths of our souls, in our hearts and in our minds, we experience this big change as a tremendous shattering of our world. Our loss is too great to allow us to take leave of [the preceding era] easily and readily. At this hour we adhere to our past with pride. We carry this pride with us into these new times, so that we might endure them with dignity and resolution. We forsake bitterness and sentimentality. One cannot master one's fate with resentment, soft-heartedness and mourning. In difficult times only determined people can assert themselves. We are now witnessing the end of an epoch, and we must be strong-willed so that it will not be our end as well. Our life in this new era will be the life of Jews, and all that we accomplish, we will accomplish as Jews. Looking both at the future and the past may lead to false perspectives and distorted perceptions. We look ahead into the future with clarity, but at the same time we are filled with both the light and the dark of the past, with its wisdom and disappointments, with all that made us fit for the challenges of life… The Jews who did not come from a ghetto and who do not wish to return to a ghetto have now found the force to plan a new Jewish life. This life combines the Jewish unity, which is a necessity in Germany, with the individual's freedom to forge his own Jewish path. This he can do within the framework of the possibilities open to him, and the limitations of the law. This path will be dictated by his own tradition and his understanding of Judaism and of Jewish fate. The five Reichsvertretung propositions, which we hereby publish, will be empty shells if not accompanied by people who can combine professional knowledge with Jewish responsibility, without empty rhetoric and agitation. There are among us such people who will turn the program of the Reichsvertretung into reality. The Central Association [CV] makes this declaration without reservation on one condition: that all representatives of the other Jewish movements join forces in facing the enormous challenges involved in maintaining Jewish values, with the same integrity and objectivity which serve as our guides. We are certain that to a large majority of the Jews of Germany…the cries of victory being voiced by certain Zionist circles sound disharmonious. These cries of woe, we have won' would be more understandable and more Jewish, were they not accompanied by this thinly veiled joy over the changes of aims and definition which the Jewish organisations must now make, due to the changing times. It is strange, but at the same time not surprising, that present circumstances have caused circles close to us to become the bearers of a wider, more comprehensive Judaism than those who identify Judaism with Zionism and thus narrow down the content and basis of their Jewish being.
