Letters to the Convention
FROM WOLFFSOHN
TO THE FEDERATION OF AMERICAN ZIONISTS,
I send your twelfth annual convention my sincerest and heartiest good wishes. May your deliberations be weighty and your conclusions fruitful and beneficent. Though annual Zionist conferences in each country are of great importance for the strengthening of our organization and the development of our flourishing activity yet to the American convention must be attributed a still greater significance. Owing to the great distance, most of our comrades in America are not in position to visit our congresses. Hence it is your duty at the conventions that you hold among yourselves to exercise upon the mass of Zionists in America the same influence and to arouse the same enthusiasm, and to create the same energy that our Congresses do in the rank and file of our party. This is of the greater importance this year since the Congress on account of the political upheaval in Turkey will not be able to meet before December. It is therefore our pressing duty not to allow the agitative energy of the party to slumber but to maintain all the driving forces in lively motion and in continual activity, so that we may appear at the congress well prepared and armed in every respect with a corresponding representation from all the groups and tendencies in our party.
The Zionist Congresses and national conventions are new centers of light in the gloomy state of our nation throughout the diaspora. The appreciation of their moral significance has not yet found its way everywhere but people are beginning already to comprehend what liberating
power resides in this factor for unification. What are the assemblages of other Jewish parties and organizations compared to ours? They may have ever so kindly ends, yet they lack the pulse beat of a united nation. They lack the consecration of an historic ideal. They are local and limited. They can be understood only in their local and temporal relationships, whereas ours is embraced in a bond of unity that includes all the Jews and all their generations of the past, present and future.
If you are conscious of this ideal value of our assemblies you will strive with all your power to shape the labors of these meetings that they may lead to really great and tangible results. We must compel respect for ourselves among the Jews in general by unfaltering, systematic labor, and consistently directed efforts in this direction will not permanently remain ineffectual.
First, the anti-Zionistic sentiment that still reigns over the widest area and is deliberately nourished. However much this sentiment may rest upon prejudice we must nevertheless reckon with it and disarm it by the counter proof of deed as we advance in every field of our activity, cooperate with differently minded people on neutral territory, and promote the great aims of Judaism; in a word, accomplish practical results by increased efficiency in every direction. With indifferentism it is more difficult to deal; but it is the duty of Zionism to fight against indifference. For this has been the enemy against which Zionism will have to fight at all times. But here too shall our energy carry off the victory.
The present circumstances and the free evolution of the Orient offer a favorable opportunity for the unfolding of all our