Gifts

Jews and gentiles helped each other last week. It began when Horace Button Taft, headmaster of Taft School (Watertown, Conn.), bustled into Cincinnati, to promote a $2,000,000 endowment fund drive for his school. He talked with prominent Cincinnatians, including his halfbrother, Charles Phelps Taft,* editor of the Cincinnati Times-Star. Next day, Brother Charles made a gift of $5,000, not to Brother Horace's school, but to the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati. The day after that, Taft School received a gift of $50,000, not from a gentile, but from Mortimer Leo Schiff, Jewish philanthropist, Manhattan banker, whose son John was a graduate of Taft School & Yale. Jews and gentiles were proud of each other.

The gift of Charles Phelps Taft was the largest yet made by a gentile to the Hebrew Union College, which is raising a $5,000,000 endowment fund. Mr. Schiff also gave $50,000 to the Hebrew Union College, as did Henry Morgenthau, Samuel Untermyer, William (cinema) Fox, Mrs. Felix M. Warburg,/- Ludwig Vogelstein; Daniel, Murry, Solomon R. Guggenheim. The estate of the late Louis Heineman contributed $150,000 and Adolph (cinema) Zukor gave $10,000.

Hebrew Union College stands on a little knoll overlooking a park on the outskirts of Cincinnati. It was founded by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise in 1875 to train preachers in the Reformed Jewish faith. Tuition is free; the number of students is small (117 this year). Famed graduates are Dr. Judah L. Magnes, president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem;

Rabbi Isaac Landman, editor of The American Hebrew and the new Jewish Encyclopedia; Abba Hillel Silver, young Cleveland rabbi.

Reformed Jewry holds its services in the U. S. in English, on Sunday instead of Saturday, with little oldtime ritual, with stress on current cultural developments. Orthodox Jewry holds tightly to tradition, regulates itself largely by the Talmud. In between these two is Conservative Jewry.

* There are four Taft brothers. The other two are William Howard Taft, Chief Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court; Henry Waters Taft, New York lawyer.

/- fHer husband last week gave $1,000,000 to the American Jewish Joint Agricultural Corporation for the establishing of Jewish farm colonies in Russia.