Reagan Receives Award From American Jewish Committee

Former President Ronald Reagan was honored Saturday night in Beverly Hills by the American Jewish Committee at its annual Executive Council meeting for his defense of Jewish concerns in international affairs.

The Committee presented Reagan with its American Liberties Medallion for moving the United States “to new heights of warmth and friendship” with Israel and enhancing “free trade and strategic partnership” between the two nations in his eight-year White House tenure. The award, at a Beverly Hilton dinner attended by nearly 1,000 people, came as the Jewish-rights organization debated at its five-day meeting whether a serious rift is growing between Israeli and American Jews over political and religious differences.

In accepting the medallion, Reagan said: “Throughout my Administration a special friendship between Israel and the United States was a cornerstone of our foreign policy because of our shared moral values.” In the quest for peace in the Middle East, he said, “courage and trust will be required” from both nations.

Past recipients of the award have included President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace prize laureate Elie Wiesel and, most recently, West German President Richard von Weizsaecker.

Although the American Jewish Committee had often criticized the Reagan Administration’s cuts in domestic social programs, the New York-based organization complimented the ex-president Saturday for “his exemplary leadership in support of the State of Israel and lifetime commitment to the freedom of Soviet Jewry.”

Reagan, who recently returned from a much-criticized, nine-day series of appearances in Japan that paid him $2 million, was not paid for his dinner appearance, Committee officials said.

Producer-director Steven Spielberg, whose motion pictures include “E.T., the Extra-terrestrial” and “The Color Purple,” was given the Committee’s Mass Media Award at the dinner “for bringing film-making to new heights while faithfully maintaining artistic integrity and deep concern for human values.”

The 83rd annual Executive Council meeting, which ends today, was attended by nearly 300 people to discuss issues such as the impact of new immigrant communities on American life and the role of media in combating prejudices. On Friday, the council announced the formation of a Pacific Rim Institute in Los Angeles to combat signs of anti-Semitism in some Far East countries and to establish Jewish relations with growing Asian-American communities in the United States.

One concern here was what a Saturday morning panelist called a “drifting apart” of Israeli and American Jews.

Jewish leaders generally agree on the primary friction points: the Israeli handling of the Palestinian uprisings and the unresolved “who is a Jew” question affecting non-Orthodox converts who emigrate to Israel and who are not totally accepted. The rabbis in Israel do not accept the validity of conversions by Reform and Conservative rabbis in other countries, a position that has drawn criticism from Reform and Conservative U.S. Jews.

It is generally seen that differences have arisen because the Israeli government has moved to the right while the U.S. Jewish community remains mainly left of center in political and religious outlook.

Arye Z. Carmon, president of the Israel-Diaspora Institute at Tel Aviv University, attributed part of the problem to “ultra-Orthodox bigotry and fundamentalism.”

U.S. Rep. Mel Levine (D-Los Angeles) likened the strains between Israeli and American Jews to a long marriage. “It can never be good all the time,” Levine said. He added, however, “we can’t allow a divorce.”

Levine said he is not adverse to expressing misgivings over Israeli policies with candor--”but privately, not publicly.”

However, the third panelist, Norman Podhoretz, the noted conservative editor of Commentary magazine, contended that “anxiety over a split is overdrawn.” He said that American and Israeli Jewish relations are better than they were in the mid-1950s.

Many U.S. Jews in 1948 held anti-Zionist views or at least were indifferent to the creation of the Jewish state at that time, Podhoretz said.