NEW YORK - The World Jewish Congress on Tuesday evening celebrated its recently published comprehensive history of the organization’s activities and achievements from its founding in Geneva in August 1936 to the present.
The World Jewish Congress, 1936-2016 was officially launched to the WJC’s 15th Plenary Assembly, April 23-25, held in New York for the first time in the organization’s eighty-year history, and was brought further into the public light with Tuesday’s event.
“In order to place the different essays that make up The World Jewish Congress, 1936-2016 in their historical context, it is important to understand the origins of the organization,” said WJC General Counsel Menachem Z. Rosensaft, who edited and compiled the book.
“In August 1936, when Rabbi Stephen Wise and Nahum Goldmann convened the founding plenary assembly of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, it was the first time that Jewish leaders from different countries joined together as a decidedly political, rather than philanthropic, body, for the express purpose of representing Jews around the world,” Rosensaft said. “And over the following several years, the fledgling organization rapidly became the most outspoken defender of Jewish rights, both publicly and in behind-the-scenes diplomatic negotiations.”
In his foreword, World Jewish Congress (WJC) President Ronald S. Lauder writes that “this book reminds us not only what the WJC did in the past, but why the Jewish people need this vital organization now more than ever and will continue to need it in the future.”
Contributors include historians Michael Brenner, Jonathan A. Bush, Suzanne Rutland, Zohar Segev, and Gregory J. Wallance; Monsignor Pier Francesco Fumagalli, vice prefect of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan; Natan Lerner, professor of law emeritus at IDC Herzliya; Gregg J. Rickman, who led the US Senate Banking Committee’s examination of Swiss banks and their treatment of Holocaust-era assets during and after World War II; Eli M. Rosenbaum, longtime head of the US Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations; and Evelyn Sommer, chairperson of the WJC’s North American Section. In the book’s concluding chapters, Ambassador Lauder lays out his vision of the Jewish future, and WJC CEO Robert Singer describes the programs and accomplishments of the WJC today.
Two of the contributors, Bush and Wallance, attended Tuesday’s event.
The World Jewish Congress, 1936-2016 is available for purchase on Amazon.
