At Designs Unlimited, Quality Is Our Custom.
"We're waiting anxiously," said
Martin Wenick, executive director of
the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
"The cutoff has caused real suffering,
and not only for Jewish immigrants.
Restoring this money will be a top pri-
ority for us."
Remaking An Image
Leaders of the Union of Councils for
Soviet Jews will be in town for a pivotal
annual meeting on Sunday. Their mis-
sion? According to Yosef Abramowitz,
the group's president, it's nothing less
than to remake the organization for a
new era in the fight to protect the mil-
lion-plus Jews remaining in Russia and
the other former Soviet republics.
"The theme of the meeting is how
we can renew the grass-roots movement
on behalf of Jews from the former
Soviet Union," he said in an interview.
"We need to find ways to reach a new
generation, to rebuild an entire move-
ment."
The group will use the meetings to
promote its new site on the World
Wide Web — the FSU Monitor
(http://www.FSUmonitor.com ) —
which Abramowitz, an Internet pub-
lisher, hopes will attract younger
activists to the cause.
The group also will target last year's
law granting protected status to only a
handful of religious groups in Russia
— a law that he says is already causing
problems in some Russian Jewish com-
munities, although the law officially
protects Judaism.
UCSJ members also will discuss
whether the group should rejoin the •
Conference of Presidents of Major
American Jewish Organizations, which
they left in a dispute over Uzbekistan
in 1991.
Abramowitz agreed that the organi-
zation's musty, rough-around-the-edges
image continues to be a problem.
"We've had the image of being a
loner, of being on the outside," he said.
"We very much want to change that.
And we want to be a. catalyst for those
who are uninvolved, but who care
about the issue."
Abramowitz said he will offer a
motion to disband the organization.
"We did that last year, and we'll do it
again; it makes us take ourselves seri-
ously as an organization, it makes us
more relevant and more useful. We
have to realize that if we don't change,
if we don't move, we'll die. If we can't
bring in new leadership and refocus our
message, we'll simply vote ourselves out
of existence. I have no problem with
that."
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