Jewish Peace Fellowship Newsletters

Five issues of the JPF Tidings, the newsletter of the Jewish Peace Fellowship, dating from 1942 to 1947. It includes volume 1, issues 2-4 and volume 4. issues 1-2.

[Description provided by dealer below]

1st edition. Original stapled mimeographed sheets, 4to (standard paper size), 4 pages to 8 leaves each issue. Holocaust- and DP-era Jewish Pacifist newsletter. The final issue here (Nov 1947) includes a pen-signed fundraising letter signed in ink by Chair of the National Executive Committee (and president), Jerome Malino. He also author’s a president’s statement in another issue Some issues highlight he purpose of the newsletter to be “To clarify the relationship of Judaism to pacifism; to aid Jewish conscientious objectors; to engage in constructive social action for the establishment of justice and peace, and for the removal of the causes of war; and provide fellowship and spiritual kinship.”

The first issue here (Vol I, Nr 2, Oct 1942, and the first issue under this title) announces that “You may be called upon in the near future to extend the hand of fellowship to Japanese students boing relocated in or near your community or you may have an opportunity to sit on a service council dedicated to meeting the social needs of our negro brethren.”

The JPF also warned that because its members will always be assumed to be cowards and slackers, they must instead strive to be models of sacrifice for humanity: “No self-respecting member of JPF can merely refrain from buying war bonds. If his neighbors are giving 10% to this cause, he must give more than 10% to the feeding of the victims of war, to the relief of civilian populations, to the support of civilian public service camps, and to all the manifold causes which look to us for aid. We can answer the charge that we are ‘aloof passivists’ only by being vigorous ‘activists’ in service and sacrifice” (p. 2).

The July 1946 issue includes a 6-leaf essay on “The Palestine Peace Problem….what is commonly called the Arab-Jewish problem in Palestine;” The Sept 1947 issue includes a full page on a Civil Rights project with CORE (the Committee on Racial Equality) led by 4 JPF members; as well as a 3-leaf analysis of “Martin Buber’s Zionist: It’s Bearing on Jewish Pacifism” by member Steven S. Schwarzschild. The Nov 1947 issue features a 3-leaf argument on “Pacifism and the Need for World Government,” by member Jacob Fried.

Other interesting content concerns relations between the JPF and the Reconstructionist and Reform movements, who has been sent to CPS camps (where conscientious objectors were sent to do work which had been impacted by war-time labor shortages), reflections on Judaism and Pacifism, support for Japanese-American deportees, Chapter News (one report is penned by a rabbinical student named Max Ticktin), and “Saving European Jewry.”

“JPF was founded in 1941 to support Jewish conscientious objectors to the military, to help educate local draft boards --accustomed only to the Christian roots of conscientious objection--of the theological basis of the Jewish position on conscientious objection, grounded in Torah, Talmud, and other sacred and religious texts….

Jewish Peace Fellowship is a Jewish voice in the peace community and a peace voice in the Jewish community. We are a nondenominational Jewish organization committed to active nonviolence as a means of resolving conflict, drawing on Jewish traditional sources within the Torah, the Talmud and contemporary peacemaking sages like Martin Buber, Judah Magnes and Abraham Joshua Heschel” (jewishpeacefellowship.org).

The first issue was instead titled “JPF News;” after this first issue, the name was changed to the present “JPF Tidings through the 4 volumes represented here. It was succeeded by simply “Tidings” starting with Vol V, and eventually “Tidings of the Jewish Peace Fellowship” for its final 2 volumes which ended in April 1964.

Jerome Malino (1911-2002), whose ink signature appears on the attached fundraising letter, was a “leader of the Central Conference of American Rabbis on both regional and national levels….A consistently outspoken proponent of rabbinic ordination for women, he was elected vice president of the CCAR in 1977 and president in 1979….He was also a member of the Alumni Overseers of the HUC-JIR, which honored him by establishing the Jerome Malino Award, bestowed on the best first-year student at JIR. Malino, a member of the National Executive Committee of the Jewish Peace Fellowship, was a pacifist and supporter of conscientious objectors to military service, even during World War II – a controversial position for a rabbi at the height of the battle against Hitler. Moreover, his advocacy of non-violence extended to the theater of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict….In 1988 Malino received the Rabbi Israel and Libby Mowshowitz Award from the New York Board of Rabbis” (Jewish Virtual Library).