Summary
The grass-roots lobbying organisation formed by Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver in 1943, which in Perceptions of Palestine organised the aggressive congressional and popular campaign for Jewish statehood in Palestine (Perceptions of Palestine, lines 628-636).
Details
- AZEC organised local chapters in every community in the country with a Jewish population, as well as in the hometown of every influential member of Congress; within little more than a year it had four hundred local committees, whose members were instructed to keep in constant touch with their representatives by writing to them and holding dinners and luncheons in their honour (lines 628-636).
- Approaching the non-Jewish community at the local level, AZEC activists organised local rallies supporting Jewish statehood and in 1944 generated pro-Zionist resolutions and telegrams to Congress from as many as three thousand organisations, from labour unions and Rotary clubs to church groups and granges (lines 628-636).
- In May 1947 AZEC sponsored an “Action for Palestine” week, urging radio stations to run public-service announcements that every American “with a sense of fair play” should “side with justice” and support partition by writing to President Truman; radio stations in over forty cities ran the spots, newspapers in thirty-one other cities ran them, and mass meetings were held in almost sixty cities (lines 824-830).