By the Grace of G-d 24th of Shevat, 5725 Brooklyn, N.Y.

Greeting and Blessing:

Thank you for your letter with the enclosed clippings. I am pleased to note that you share my views on the question of Federal Aid to Parochial Schools, a position which, I am glad to see, is gaining ever-growing support, despite the obdurate opposition by certain misguided Jewish groups. I trust you will continue to use your utmost influence in this direction, for the issue concerns a public matter of paramount importance. In view of the confusion, misconceptions and even misrepresentations of values prevailing in the present day and age, all right-thinking people have a special responsibility to clear away the cobwebs of misconceptions and to expose misrepresentation.

You ask me to comment on President Johnson’s education program as it might affect Jewish Day Schools.

Let me say, first of all, that the proposals now pending in Congress do not of course provide a final solution to the problem of, nor do they satisfy the justifiable demands for, Federal support for the secular departments of Parochial Schools. Nevertheless, the President’s proposals should be welcomed as a step in the right direction.

The most incisive comment that can be made in this regard is that the real merits of the program will depend on its actual execution namely, how and by whom the program will be administered and how the funds will be distributed. If this is true of any bill passed by Congress, it is particularly true of the Education Bill, inasmuch as the interpretation and execution of the program is left to the discretion of Federal, State and local officials, whose views and personal feelings may or may not be at variance with the President’s avowed policy.

The extent of the benefit to Jewish Day Schools will thus depend on the actual executors of the Bill.

In view of the fact that so much depends on the executors of the Bill, to make it or break it, I must reiterate a view which I have voiced before and which I trust will meet with your agreement and utmost support. It is the need to make sure from the outset that all those groups and individuals who had placed themselves on public record in vehement opposition to Federal Aid to Parochial Schools should be excluded from administering this program. Their prejudice in this area obviously makes them suspect of endeavoring to thwart every effort on the part of the Day Schools to obtain their fair share, meager as it is, of this Federal aid.

It will be no revelation to add that efforts are already in progress on the part of the antagonists to Federal Aid to non-public schools to sabotage the President’s education program, either through preventing its passage in Congress or, failing that, through grasping the administrative end of the program, to make themselves the interpreters and distributors of the funds.

I must also emphasize again one crucial aspect of the controversy namely, that the preponderant majority of the vociferous Jewish antagonists of Federal Aid to Parochial Schools are those who are opposed to the whole idea of Parochial Schools. Many of them are the very individuals who have the main say in the distribution of Federation funds and community chests, which have notoriously resisted support of Yeshivot and Day Schools, either giving them miserable token allocations or excluding them altogether. The painful subject surely requires no elaboration to you.

With esteem and blessing,