Remembering President Reagan - 06.07.2004

Reagan's Legacy JTA - Reagan Advocated For Jewish Causes JTA - Reagan ‘Got’ Jewish Issues  New York Jewish Week - For Jews, Reagan’s Mixed Legacy NCSJ Press Release Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Reagan Funeral

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Despite occasional disagreements, Reagan advocated for Jewish causes 

By Ron Kampeas 

WASHINGTON, June 6 (JTA) —  Ronald Reagan’s presidency was a time when U.S. Jewish power grew to new levels of influence — and when Jews learned of its limits.

Thanks to Reagan, who died Saturday at age 93 after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s, the years 1981-1989 saw the consolidation of bipartisan support for the causes Jews held dearest: a secure Israel and the freedom of Soviet Jews.

It also saw the Republican Party become an acceptable option for Jews, ensuring that no single party could take the Jewish vote for granted.

“Historians will look back and say the Reagan years were the years the Jewish community looked back and tried the Republican Party on for size,” said Marshall Breger, Reagan’s liaison to the Jewish community from 1983 to 1985. “That began the process of developing a comfort level which is now only coming to fruition. The Reagan administration turned the Jews into a two-party community.” 

Yet Reagan also dealt the Jewish community two severe blows when he triumphed in pushing through Congress the sale of powerful spy planes to Saudi Arabia and when he delivered a forgive-and-forget paean at the Bitburg cemetery in Germany, where Nazi SS troops are buried.

Also, the political polarization now besetting domestic issues important to many Jews — including abortion rights, poverty relief and government medical assistance — was launched during the Reagan years.

“Reagan legitimated a right-wing, biblical, Victorian view of the family,”said Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a leading Jewish feminist. “We’ve been paying for it ever since.” 

Despite such issues, Reagan’s presidency now is seen by many as halcyon days for Jewish issues in foreign policy, principally because of the effects of Reagan’s greatest triumph: the near-total collapse of the Communist world. 

“The end of the Cold War was important not just for the free world but for diminishing the cause of rejectionist Arab states and enabling Soviet Jews to be free,” said David Makovsky, then a leading Soviet Jewry activist and now a top Middle East analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “We can only be grateful for this.” 

Mark Levin, also a prominent Soviet Jewry activist in those days, emphasized that the benefits the struggle for Soviet Jewry derived from Reagan’s crusade against the “Evil Empire” were not incidental; for Reagan, Soviet Jewish freedom was central to the struggle.

Reagan made sure Soviet Jewry was a priority at each meeting between American and Soviet officials, along with nuclear disarmament and economic assistance, recalled Levin, now the executive director of NCSJ: Advocates on Behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States and Eurasia. 

“He was someone who was truly committed to overturning the Communist system and gaining freedom for all people, but he had a particularly soft spot in his heart for Soviet Jewry,” Levin said.

Max Kampelman, Reagan’s chief arms reduction negotiator, said Reagan’s interest in Jewish issues came naturally. The two had frequent and long conversations about Israel and anti-Semitism, he told JTA.

Still there were times when Reagan’s interest caught even Kampelman, a carryover from the Carter administration, off guard.

In one 1982 meeting, Kampelman proposed making dissidents part of the negotiating package on arms reduction with the Soviets. The suggestion might have undermined the talks and was likely to raise the hackles of some allies, but Reagan was receptive.

At the end of the meeting, Kampelman recalled, “he gave me a list of people, and said, ‘See what you can do about helping these people in Russia.’ ”

He said he didn’t look at the list until he left his office and it was a list of Jewish refuseniks.”

One of the most prominent of those refuseniks, Natan Sharansky, now an Israeli Cabinet minister, sent Reagan’s wife, Nancy, a letter of consolation Sunday and expressed his gratitude to the former president.

“Former President Reagan changed the march of history and the fate of millions of people because he was one of the few, outstanding leaders who brought about the collapse of the Soviet Empire,” wrote Sharansky, whose dramatic release from a Soviet prison in 1986 and immigration to Israel portended the end of the struggle for Soviet Jews.

Reagan also earned Jewish admiration for appointing secretaries of state who were sympathetic to Israel. Alexander Haig and George Schultz both broke with the traditional “bad cop” role that the Cabinet officer usually plays with the Jewish state.

But the president’s visceral sympathy for Israel was undermined by his uneasy relations with then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The leaders’ styles inevitably clashed: the avuncular, give-me-the-big-picture movie star versus the proper European-born lawyer. 

“There were many misreadings,” Breger recalled. 

When Begin said “no problem” about settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, Reagan assumed Israel was agreeing to a freeze; but Begin merely was saying, with characteristic confidence, that the settlements should not pose a problem. 

“Theirs were different personalities,” Breger said, so much so that Reagan expressed relief in 1984 after his first meeting with Begin’s successor, Yitzhak Shamir — even though Shamir sometimes took a harder line than Begin.

The first crisis of Israel ties during Reagan’s presidency was occasioned by Israel’s attack in June 1981 on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor.

Reagan, a proponent of nuclear power in the United States, was upset that an ally ostensibly was reinforcing perceptions that all nuclear power posed dangers, and he suspended arms shipments to Israel in response. Reagan said Iraq, which the United States then supported, may have been persuaded to use the nuclear reactor for peaceful purposes. 

Reagan also resented the lobbying by Israel and its supporters against the sale of AWACS spy planes to Saudi Arabia in 1981. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, outraged that Reagan was reneging on a campaign promise so soon after his election, got the House of Representatives to oppose the sale.

When the battle went to the Senate, Reagan, eager for a triumph with an irascible Congress, played hardball. He and his aides raised the specter of dual loyalty charges.

“The administration was out there saying ‘Reagan or Begin,’ ” recalled Ira Forman, then the political director for AIPAC and now the executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council. 

Begin’s opposition to the sale especially peeved Reagan, and on Oct. 1 of that year, Reagan famously said “It is not the business of other nations to make American foreign policy.” 

That set off a wave of anti-Semitic hate mail to senators. The AWACS sale triumphed in the Senate, and the apparent succumbing to warnings about excessive Jewish influence was a shock for a pro-Israel community that had become increasingly confident in its influence since the Yom Kippur War.

Reagan attempted to make amends after the vote by proposing a strategic relationship with Israel in November 1981. Begin and the Knesset surprised Reagan a month later by annexing the Golan Heights, territory claimed by Syria. 

Reagan withdrew his offer, and two months after Reagan’s October remark, Begin got his own back at Reagan: Israel was nobody’s “banana republic,” the Israeli prime minister said, a defiant statement that undermined Reagan’s desire to appear in control of events. 

Less than a year later, in June 1982, tempers flared again when Israel invaded Lebanon in order to oust the PLO from its stronghold there. Israel said it got a “yellow light” from Secretary of State Haig — a fact that helped accelerate Haig’s departure from office.

More substantially, Reagan secretly formulated a plan not only to pull Israeli troops out of Lebanon, but to force Israel into withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza. He ultimately envisioned Palestinian autonomy in a federal system with Jordan. 

When Reagan announced the plan on Sept. 1, 1982, Begin said it was “the saddest day of my life.” Ultimately, resistance by the Likud Party-led Cabinet killed the plan. 

Only days later, Israel’s Christian allies in Lebanon, the Phalangists, raided a Palestinian refugee camp and slaughtered hundreds of civilians there. The ensuing controversy over the degree of Israel’s responsibility poisoned Israel’s image in the West. It also led to the resignation of Israel’s then-defense minister, Ariel Sharon.

Reagan reacted to the event, known as the Sabra and Shatila massacre, by creating a multinational force to help keep the peace in Lebanon. 

He also kept on his desk a photograph of a Lebanese toddler who presumably had lost her limbs in an Israeli attack — although later research would prove the photo was a distortion; it was a girl who was recovering from a broken arm.

In response to Reagan’s office gesture, Begin put on his desk the famous photo of a young boy surrendering to Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto.

It didn’t help Israel that when a suicide attack the following summer in Lebanon killed 241 U.S. Marines, some blamed Israel for dragging the United States into the conflict there. In truth, Israeli officials had tried hard to persuade Reagan not to deploy troops to the region.

The attack on the Marine barracks created an impression that would dog Israel throughout the 1980s and beyond: Israel somehow was responsible for anti-American terrorism.

Despite such tensions, affection for Reagan persisted among Jews. He earned a respectable 31 percent of the Jewish vote in the 1984 elections, though it did not match the 39 percent he had won in 1980, when the pro-Reagan Jewish vote largely was the result of voter backlash against the policies of President Carter. 

The most serious test of Reagan’s relationship with the Jews came after those elections, when Reagan announced in April 1985 that he would visit Bitburg, a World War II military cemetery, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of D-Day.

Reagan’s optimism, so valued by the Jewish community when it came to his hopes for Israel and Soviet Jewry, was a factor in this decision: The president wanted to look ahead, not backward, he said.

But U.S. Jews were stunned, especially when they learned that more than 40 members of the Waffen SS were buried at Bitburg. Not even a personal appeal from Elie Wiesel, America’s best-known Holocaust survivor, could dissuade Reagan. 

The failure to keep Reagan from Bitburg was another reminder of the limits of organized Jewish suasion. But again, Jewish bitterness eventually melted away because of the bigger picture that encompassed Reagan’s friendliness to Jews. 

“With Reagan, you had disagreements but you couldn’t get angry with him,” recalled Hyman Bookbinder, then the Washington director of the American Jewish Committee. “That explains a lot of the comity; his staff was open to me and others who wanted to communicate our feelings.” 

Breger makes the case that Bitburg was necessary to keep Germany on board with U.S. policies. Propping up Chancellor Helmut Kohl helped keep Pershing missiles in Europe, which helped bring the Soviet Union to its knees. 

Breger also said Reagan’s priority in the Middle East always was Israel’s security. 

“President Reagan made his decisions on the basis of the option papers he was given, and he would always choose the option least injurious to Israel,” Breger said. “The Jewish community would say ‘gevalt,’ but they didn’t know the other options.” 

On the domestic front, Reagan often was accused of clumsiness when it came to understanding minorities — his remarks on “welfare queens” drew fire from blacks, to cite one notable example — but he acted swiftly whenever anyone close to him expressed outright bigotry. 

Reagan forced James Watt, his interior secretary, to resign in 1983 after Watt said of one of his department’s committees, “I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent.”

Reagan promised social reforms to Christian conservatives, but he never pursued those pledges with great enthusiasm. In 1982, he introduced a school prayer amendment but let it die in Congress; in 1987, he did little to stop the steamrolling of his Supreme Court candidate, Robert Bork.

Still, the symbolic weight he gave to the ideas of the Christian right, through repeated appearances with its leaders and through his speeches, gave that constituency access to power that it otherwise might not have had.

“He set the stage over many of the battles over social issues, choice, marriage amendment, school prayer,” said Mark Pelavin, then a legislative assistant with the American Jewish Congress and now the associate director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center.

Pelavin said the Christian right and small-government advocates gained their first footholds with Reagan. 

“The whole anti-poverty agenda, the whole idea of trickle-down economics, making people stronger by supporting them less — it hasn’t proven true,” Pelavin said. 

Still, that did not diminish Reagan’s other achievements, Pelavin said. 

“The end of the Cold War, strengthening the U.S.-Israel alliance — he was a pivotal figure and his achievements will be long-lasting,” he said.

JTA correspondents Matthew E. Berger in Washington and Lev Krichevsky in Moscow contributed to this report. 

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Ronald Reagan remembered as president who ‘got’ Jewish issues

By Matthew E. Berger 

WASHINGTON, June 6 (JTA) — Some Jewish officials said they had a certain perception of Ronald Reagan when they walked into the White House during the 1980s: that the 40th president of the United States was aloof and unfamiliar with the complexities of the issues of the day. 

But when they walked out of meetings with Reagan, those perceptions often had changed. 

“He was far brighter than he was given credit for,” said Shoshana Cardin, former chairwoman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “He was far more knowledgeable.” 

Even Jewish leaders who didn’t always agree with Reagan on political issues are remembering Reagan, who died Saturday at age 93 in California, as a man deeply committed to the issues the Jewish community focused on during the 1980s. 

But beyond that, many remembered Reagan as a man who was open and interested in listening to the Jewish community.

“There was respect shown; there was no hostility,” said Hyman Bookbinder, the longtime Washington representative for the American Jewish Committee. “With Reagan, you has disagreements but you didn’t get angry with him.” 

Reagan’s familiarity with Jewish concerns began in Hollywood, where as an actor he worked closely with many Jews, said Marshall Breger, the Jewish liaison in the Reagan White House. 

Even before first running for office in the mid-1960s, he resigned from the Lakeside Country Club in Los Angeles because it refused to admit Jews.

Shortly after becoming governor of California, he spoke out in support of Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War and headlined a pro-Israel rally at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl. 

“He had this tremendous ability to take people as they were, and he had a complete lack of social prejudice,” Breger said. “It was evident when you heard him, spoke to him, came into contact with him.” 

The interests of the Reagan administration and American Jews intersected throughout much of Reagan’s time in the White House. 

As Reagan worked to end the Communist threat in the Soviet bloc, American Jews sought to give Jews there the right to practice their religion freely and emigrate if they so chose.

Reagan was able to use the Soviet Jewry issue as an entryway into negotiations with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. 

It framed the discussion when Gorbachev first came to Washington, a day after 250,000 people rallied there for Soviet Jews. And Reagan showed a strong personal commitment to the Soviet Jewry issue, whether he was dealing with Jewish officials or the Soviets. 

When Theodore Mann returned from his first visit to the Soviet Union as head of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry in 1981, the first call he received in his law office was from Reagan. 

“He wanted to know all about the trip,” Mann recalled. “We talked about the refusenik community, which he was very familiar with.”

Cardin recalled that in 1987, when attending a White House ceremony marking the arrival in the United States of refusenik Vladimir Slepak, she began to see Reagan in a way she had not seen other presidents, especially Republicans. 

“I realized we had in the White House probably the warmest, most attentive individual to individual needs,” Cardin said. “This man cared.” 

Despite being a conservative Republican, Reagan still had a way of making a positive impression on a Jewish constituency that was mostly liberal and Democratic — even if they disagreed with him on domestic issues like abortion, taxes and social programs.

“There was no one who was better at working a crowd, and no one who was better at selling an idea, and that’s why I think in hindsight the tensions faded,” said Mark Pelavin, who was a legislative assistant at the American Jewish Congress in the Reagan years and is now associate director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. 

Reagan’s support allowed Jews to feel more comfortable backing and voting for Republicans, and it led to the growth of a Republican Jewish constituency.

“President Reagan is directly responsible for the founding of the Republican Jewish Coalition and was the leading figure in starting the movement within the Jewish community for greater support for Republican candidates,” said Matthew Brooks, the group’s executive director. “He set the tone, he set the direction and he really led the Republican Party to where it is now in terms of its commitment to reaching out to the Jewish community.” 

But there also were occasions of disagreement between Reagan and the Jews. 

Reagan’s decision to visit the Bitburg military cemetery in Germany in 1985, despite the fact that it contained graves of SS soldiers who had committed war-crime massacres, led to protests and a month of back-room negotiations between administration officials and Jewish leaders. 

In the end, Reagan added a trip to Bergen-Belsen to appease American Jews, but many remained upset about the episode. 

Reagan also upset many Jews when he pushed through the sale of powerful spy planes to Saudi Arabia.

But many Jews appreciated Reagan for his support for Soviet Jewry.

“I think it was easy to compartmentalize,” said David Harris, a Soviet Jewry advocate who now is executive director of the American Jewish Committee. “Bitburg was Bitburg. It was very troubling, but this was a president who from the get-go had demonstrated his commitment to our issues.” 

In his 1980 debate with the incumbent President Carter, Reagan asked viewers, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” After Reagan’s death this week, Jewish officials said they saw a Jewish world that was better when Reagan left office in 1989 than when he took office.

“The decade began on very troubling and sour notes,” Harris said. “The decade ended with much more optimism. I cannot attribute all of it to Ronald Reagan, but he certainly deserves his share of the credit.”

(JTA Washington Bureau Chief Ron Kampeas contributed to this report.)

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New York Jewish Week

June 11, 2004

For Jews, Reagan’s Mixed Legacy

Inspired a generation but hewed to a tough line on Israel, experts recall. 

James D. Besser - Washington Correspondent

For Rep. Eric Cantor, former President Ronald Reagan was a life-changing symbol of the potential of politics to remake the world. 

“He was a major inspiration for me to get into politics,” said Cantor, 41, a rising star in the Republican congressional leadership who was in high school when Reagan was elected to his first term in 1980. 

“My parents got very involved in his campaign in Virginia,” he said. “They attended the convention in Detroit where he was nominated. What I remember the most was his ability to inspire change and to overcome the naysayers.” 

In particular, the Richmond, Va.-area lawmaker was attracted to Reagan’s “value-based foreign policy,” his support for a “strategic relationship” with Israel and his domestic economic positions. 

But Cantor’s special status — he is the only Jewish Republican in the House — highlights another aspect of Reagan’s legacy: The former president, who died on Saturday after a 10-year descent through the nightmare of Alzheimer’s disease, was able to galvanize a cadre of committed young 

Still, he failed to trigger a seismic shift of Jewish voters to the GOP. 

Reagan, challenging the unpopular Jimmy Carter in 1980, garnered the highest Jewish vote for a Republican (39 percent) since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. But he slipped in 1984, to 31 percent, in large part because of his growing association with another rising group in American politics: the religious right. 

Marshall Breger, a Washington law professor, served as special assistant to Reagan responsible for outreach to the Jewish community and academia — White House officials joked it was really a single portfolio. Breger said the growth of the religious right was a factor limiting Reagan’s political impact. 

“In the early summer of ’84, the polling showed Jewish support for Reagan close to 50 percent,” Breger said this week. “After the nomination, he spoke at a Christian prayer breakfast in Texas. It was a religious-oriented speech. And that speech was used with dramatic effect by Jewish Democrats to push the community support down dramatically.” 

Breger said Jewish fears about the religious right connection were unfounded. Other political observers say it was the start of a political dilemma for the Republicans that continues to this day. 

Reagan’s role in the rise of the religious right is only one element in a mixed Jewish legacy. He presided over one of the biggest changes in U.S.-Israel relations, giving substance to the evolving idea of Israel as a vital ally. 

“The relationship between the U.S. and Israel was placed on a strategic level, and Israel was seen in very clear terms as a strategic asset rather than a moral burden,” Breger said. 

The idea of a strategic relationship between the two allies was first promoted by President Jimmy Carter, mostly as a way of ensuring Israeli cooperation in his peace efforts. Reagan expanded the concept and formalized it with joint military planning groups, memoranda of understanding and countless exchanges between the armed forces of the two countries. 

That also set the stage for cooperation on projects like Israel’s Arrow anti-ballistic missile, a vital element in Israel’s ability to meet new threats. 

But Reagan also displayed a willingness to play hardball with Israeli leaders. 

In 1981, administration officials told Congress they had a choice between “Reagan or Begin” as the White House fought off efforts by the pro-Israel lobby to block the sale of AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia. In 1982, he tried to cut foreign aid because of Israel’s coolness toward the “Reagan plan” for Mideast peace. 

“I would put him down as very anxious to support a strong Israel, but also very sensitive to Israel’s actions at the time, particularly the entry into Lebanon, and particularly in dealing with Prime Minister Begin,” said Jack Stein, a longtime Jewish Republican activist who served as a special adviser at the Reagan White House. 

Stein said that Begin assured Reagan he would not go public with his opposition to the AWACS sale — “and then immediately went before Congress and went to the press with his opposition. It upset Reagan, who then went to Congress. That’s when we started seeing bumper stickers saying ‘Reagan or Begin.’ ” 

Stein said Reagan applied the same moral clarity to the Mideast conflict that he applied to the rest of the world. 

“He was a very determined president,” Stein said. “This was particularly true in Lebanon, where he did not approve at all of Israel’s military actions.” 

Stein said there were “problems” with some close Reagan advisers, including communications director Pat Buchanan. “But I never sensed in Reagan in conversations that there was anything other than support for Israel and respect for Jewish interests in the United States,” he said. 

Reagan’s most important contribution to the Jewish state, Stein said, was “the fact that he was able to destroy the infrastructure of the Soviet Union.” 

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said that Reagan “was not one of the great presidents for Israel and the Jewish community. Not only that, he confronted us in a way he didn’t need to confront us, especially on the AWACS. It was a sobering lesson that we learned a lot from.” 

Reagan’s legacy for Soviet Jews was less mixed. 

“He turned out to be a seminal figure in our movement,” said Mark Levin, executive director of NCSJ, a leading Soviet Jewry group. “Reagan made human rights and the plight of Soviet Jews one of the four pillars in his policy toward the Soviet Union. He met with refuseniks, hosted a meeting with human rights activists in Moscow, encouraged his foreign policy team to use every opportunity to raise the issue.” 

Reagan’s stance on the issue, Levin said, was a function of his “hatred of totalitarianism. Here was a group of people who were challenging the ultimate totalitarian state, and so he supported them.” 

Political Impact 

Not surprisingly, a mixed record on key Jewish issues produced a mixed political impact. Reagan helped open the door to greater Jewish support for the Republican Party, and in particular his foreign and military policies drew Jewish neo-conservatives from the Democratic to the Republican side. 

But he also helped unleash forces, primarily the religious right, that made many Jews uneasy with the Republicans even as they began to perceive the party as stronger on Israel. 

Reagan “made it possible for the ‘Scoop Jackson Democrats’ to think about Republicanism,” said Shoshana Bryen, special projects director for the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. 

Jackson, hawkish on defense but progressive domestically, was fading as an influence on the party. After four years of Jimmy Carter and with another Jackson — Jesse — eager to take on a greater party role, the Democrats were increasingly seen as soft on defense. 

Reagan effectively reached Jewish activists who believed a strong Israel depended on a strong United States, Bryen said. 

A generation of Jewish neo-conservatives were drawn into the Republican fold by the Reagan revolution, including some who now serve in senior posts in the current Bush administration. 

“The Reagan administration set the stage for political change in the Jewish community,” said Breger, the Jewish liaison. “It was the period in which the intellectual basis for Jewish Republican thought developed, with the neocons moving to the Republican Party. It was the time when the infrastructure of Jewish Republicanism developed, including the Republican Jewish Coalition.” 

But that shift was never very deep. Twelve years after Reagan won 39 percent of the Jewish vote, George H.W. Bush, his successor, won only 11 percent. 

“Reagan had a gift for coalition building, and if it had been him alone, he probably could have managed the Christian right and a larger than normal Jewish vote in 1984,” said University of Akron political scientist John Green, who studies the religious conservatives. “After all, many Jews agreed with Reagan on defense, support for Israel and opposition to communism. But the movement of the Christian right into the GOP, which Reagan facilitated, was much larger than Reagan himself.” 

Ironically, Green said, Reagan “never spent political capital on the Christian right’s agenda,” but his identification with that sector gave it a huge political boost and hurt the GOP’s effort to sell the party to wary Jews. 

Reagan’s reputation among Jewish voters was tainted also by his 1985 trip to Germany that included a visit to a cemetery in Bitburg where some Waffen SS soldiers were buried. The Germany visit was planned to reaffirm close U.S.-German ties and, according to Breger, to give a political boost to Chancellor Helmut Kohl. 

“Bitburg was chosen because it was one of the few German cities with a [U.S.] Air Force base with good relations between the base and the town,” Breger said. “The cemetery was chosen as an opportunity for an act of reconciliation.” 

What the White House advance team failed to notice because of a snowstorm, Breger said, were the graves of the Waffen SS soldiers. 

“When the controversy arose, it became extremely difficult to back down,” he said. “The possibility of changing the site would have meant rebuking the Germans. Instead of this being a positive meeting for Kohl, it would have been a negative one.” 

The uproar reached a peak when Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, at a White House awards ceremony, said to Reagan, “I implore you do to something else, to find another way, another site. That place, Mr. President, is not your place.” 

But the administration did not back down, and Bitburg became a bitter footnote to the Reagan legacy for some Jews.

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PRESS RELEASE

NCSJ Mourns Pres. Reagan, Honors His Memory

Contact: Shai Franklin, NCSJ (202-898-2500)

June 8, 2004 – The leadership of NCSJ, Chairman Robert J. Meth, President Joel M. Schindler, and Executive Director Mark B. Levin, issued the following statement on the passing of President Ronald Reagan:

“President Ronald Reagan was a champion for human rights in many ways, but his legacy is unique in the primacy he devoted to the cause of Soviet Jewry. His personal outreach to prisoners of conscience and refuseniks translated into ongoing high-level deliberations at every official U.S.-Soviet bilateral meeting. Working directly and through Secretary of State George Shultz, President Reagan not only redoubled U.S. diplomacy in support of Soviet Jewry – visits to homes, seders in the Embassy, speeches, lists – he enshrined human rights and Soviet Jewry as cornerstones of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union and its successors, in perpetuity. 

“As we continue to promote regional cooperation to fight anti-Semitism, and as we work with the successor states to secure the rights of Jewish communities, we are aided by diplomats on both sides who came of age in the Reagan era – which, for us, means that they share an awareness and in many cases a passion born of experience and example.

“As American Jews, we are generally proud of our nation and its leaders. When we remember Ronald Reagan, especially when we do so as a movement, it will always be with particular pride, admiration, and appreciation. He will be missed, just as his legacy informs our common mission.”

NCSJ: Advocates on behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States & Eurasia – a voluntary, non-profit agency created in 1971 – is the mandated central coordinating agency of the organized American Jewish community for policy and activities on behalf of the estimated 1.5 million Jews in the former Soviet Union. NCSJ comprises nearly 50 national organizations and over 300 local federations, community councils and committees across the United States. Through this extensive network, NCSJ mobilizes the resources, energies and talents of millions of U.S. citizens, and also represents the American Jewish community in dealings with similar national groups abroad, and at international fora. 

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