American Jewish Year Book

AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 1981 AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE AND JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA The 1981 AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK, the eighty-first in the series, continues to offer a unique chronicle of developments in areas of concern to Jews throughout the world. The present volume features two major articles dealing with Jewish demography: "Jews in the United States: Perspectives from Demography" by Sidney Goldstein of Brown University and "Jewish Survival: The Demographic Fac- tors" by U. 0. Schmelz of the Hebrew University. The review of developments in the United States includes Murray Friedman's "Intergroup Rela- tions"; George Gruen's "The United States, Israel, and the Mid- dle East"; and Jonathan Woocher's "The 'Civil Judaism' of Communal Leaders." Alvin Chenkin and May- nard Miran provide revised U.S. Jewish population estimates. Jewish life around the world is reported on in a series of articles dealing with Israel, Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, (Continued on back flap) $20. American Jewish Year Book American Jewish Year Book VOLUME 81 Prepared by THE AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE Editors MILTON HIMMELFARB DAVID SINGER Editor Emeritus MORRIS FINE THE AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE NEW YORK THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA PHILADELPHIA COPYRIGHT, 1980 BY THE AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE AND THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper. ISBN 0-8276-0185-9 Library of Congress Catalogue Number: 99-4040 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN, INC., SCRANTON, PA. Preface Thtiee present volume contains two major feature articles dealing with Jewish demography: "Jews in the United States: Perspectives from Demography" by Sidney Goldstein and "Jewish Survival: The Demographic Factors" by U.O. Schmelz. The review of developments in the United States includes Murray Friedman's "Intergroup Relations"; George Gruen's "The United States, Israel, and the Middle East"; and Jonathan Woocher's "The 'Civil Judaism' of Communal Leaders." Alvin Chenkin and Maynard Miran provide revised U.S. Jewish population estimates. Jewish life around the world is reported on in a series of articles dealing with Israel, Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Poland, Hun- gary, Czechoslovakia, and South Africa. New estimates for the world Jewish population are given. Carefully compiled directories of national Jewish organizations, periodicals, and federations and welfare funds, as well as religious calendars and obituary notices, round out the 1981 AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK. We are very grateful to our colleague Carol Sue Davidson for technical and editorial assistance. Thanks are also due to Cyma M. Horowitz, director of the Blaustein Library, Lotte Zajac, and all our other co-workers in the Information and Research Department. THE EDITORS Contributors BERNARD BASKIN; rabbi, Temple Anshe Sholom, Hamilton, Ontario. ALVIN CHENKIN; research consultant, Council of Jewish Federations and Wel- fare Funds, New York. DENIS DIAMOND; associate director, World Jewish Congress, Israel branch, Jerusalem. MURRAY FRIEDMAN; director, middle atlantic region, American Jewish Com- mittee, Philadelphia. SIDNEY GOLDSTEIN; George Hazard Crooker University Professor; director, professor of sociology, Population Studies and Training Center, Brown Univer- sity, Providence. GEORGE E. GRUEN; director, Israel and Middle East affairs, foreign affairs department, American Jewish Committee, New York. LIONEL E. KOCHAN; Bearsted Reader in Jewish history, University of Warwick; honorary fellow, Oxford Centre for Post-graduate Studies, Oxford. MIRIAM KOCHAN; journalist; translator, Oxford. MISHA LOUVISH; writer; translator; journalist, Jerusalem. ARNOLD MANDEL; essayist; novelist; reporter and literary critic, Information Juive and L 'Arche, Paris. MAYNARD MIRAN; research associate, Council of Jewish Federations and Wel- fare Funds, New York. FRIEDO SACHSER; political and news editor, Allgemeine Jiidische Wochen- zeitung; German correspondent, London Jewish Chronicle, Diisseldorf. U.O. SCHMELZ; associate professor, Jewish demography, Institute of Contempo- rary Jewry, Hebrew University; director, demographic and social division, Cen- tral Bureau of Statistics, Jerusalem. LEON SHAPIRO; Rutgers University, retired, New York. JONATHAN S. WOOCHER; assistant professor of Jewish communal service, Brandeis University, Waltham. vn Table of Contents PREFACE CONTRIBUTORS vn SPECIAL ARTICLES Jews in the United States: Perspectives from Demography Sidney Goldstein 3 Jewish Survival: The Demographic Factors U.O. Schmelz 61 UNITED STATES CIVIC AND POLITICAL Intergroup Relations Murray Friedman 121 The United States, Israel, and the Middle East George E. Gruen 134 COMMUNAL The 'Civil Judaism' of Communal Leaders Jonathan S. Woocher 149 DEMOGRAPHIC Jewish Population in the United States, 1980 Alvin Chenkin and Maynard Miran 170 ix X / CONTENTS OTHER COUNTRIES CANADA Bernard Baskin 183 WESTERN EUROPE Lionel and Miriam Great Britain Kochan 192 Arnold Mandel 202 France CENTRAL EUROPE Federal Republic of Germany Friedo Sachser 208 German Democratic Republic Friedo Sachser 232 EASTERN EUROPE Soviet Union Leon Shapiro 235 Soviet Bloc Nations Leon Shapiro 245 ISRAEL Misha Louvish 252 SOUTH AFRICA Denis Diamond 275 WORLD JEWISH POPULATION Leon Shapiro 284 DIRECTORIES, LISTS AND NECROLOGY NATIONAL JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS United States 295 Canada 336 JEWISH FEDERATIONS, WELFARE FUNDS, COMMUNITY COUNCILS 339 JEWISH PERIODICALS United States 354 Canada 362 NECROLOGY: UNITED STATES 363 CONTENTS / xi SUMMARY JEWISH CALENDAR, 5741-5745 (Sept. 1980-Sept. 1985) 380 CONDENSED MONTHLY CALENDAR, 1980-1982 (5740-5743) 382 REPORT OF JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA 409 SPECIAL ARTICLES IN VOLUMES 51-80 OF THE AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK 417 INDEX 421 Special Articles Jews in the United States: Perspectives from Demography by SIDNEY GOLDSTEIN LT A TIME WHEN THE demographic, social, and perhaps even economic structure of the American Jewish community is undergo- ing rapid change, there is a crucial need for a continuous monitoring of the situation and an assessment of its implications for the future. Changes in size, composition, and distribution, as well as in the patterns and levels of births and deaths, have tremendous significance on both the local and national levels. Knowledge of demographic factors is clearly essential for purposes of planning whether a community should provide certain services, where facilities should be located, how they should be staffed, and who should bear the funding burden. Moreover, the demographic structure of the Jewish community greatly affects its social, cultural, and religious viability, whether this is judged by the ability to support an educational system, to organize religious life, or to provide sufficient density of population to insure a sense of community. Because the socio-demographic structure of the Jewish community, like that of the larger American community, is both a product and a cause of change, we clearly need to have current data available. Unfortu- nately, however, such data are often lacking.1 The absence of a question on religion in the United States decennial census precludes tapping the wealth of information that would otherwise be available from that source on the religious characteristics of local popula- tions. The need for comprehensive data on religious identification is in- dicated by the fact that perhaps the best single source of information available on the size and composition of Jews and other religious groups remains that collected by the Bureau of the Census in the 1957 Current Note: This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the Colloquium on Jewish Life in the United States: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, sponsored by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, May 28-29, 1978. The study draws heavily on material previously published by the author in "American Jewry, 1970: A Demographic Profile," AJYB, Vol. 72, 1971, pp. 3-88. 'An excellent review of the varied efforts undertaken between 1818 and 1977 to gather and assess statistics on the American Jewish community appears in Jack Diamond, "A Reader in the Demography of American Jews," AJYB, Vol. 77, 1977, pp. 251-317. 4 / AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK, 1981 Population Survey." Because answers were voluntary, the survey was able to include a question on religion. But 1957 is long past, and much has happened to the American population and to American Jewry since then. The 1957 data, therefore, relatively rich though they are, can serve only as a bench mark against which changes can be measured, rather than as an indication of the current situation. Unfortunately, we have few new sets of comprehensive data. The National Jewish Population Study (NJPS) was an important and promising attempt to conduct a nationwide survey representative of the United States Jewish population. As a report in the 1973 AMERICAN JEWISH YEAR BOOK (AJYB) indicates: "The study, sponsored by the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, now has completed data collection and other tasks prerequisite to analysis, and constitutes a reposi- tory of information that will require 'mining' and interpretation for many years to come."2 The NJPS remains largely just that—to date only a few published

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