Jimmy Woos the Jewish Leaders

"The world isn't used to your open diplomacy. It stiffens the back of Israel and raises the expectations of the Arabs, which, once frustrated, will retard rather than bring peace." During a week of buffeting over U.S.-Soviet relations. Jimmy Carter hardly needed that sober assessment of his Middle East policy. But it came last Wednesday from Rabbi Alexander Schindler, one of the 53 Jewish leaders invited to a dialogue with the President at the White House.

They spent one hour and 20 minutes with Carter and his foreign policy formulators, including Vice President Walter Mondale, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. Worried by Administration declarations about what Israel might have to give up in exchange for peace, the Jewish leaders sought --and gained--reassurances from Carter. Said one: "He was so forthcoming that he allayed some of our concerns."

Those concerns arose largely because Carter had appeared to shift ground in his Middle East policy. During the campaign, his stress was on help for Israel. As President, he has taken a sterner line, suggesting that Israel withdraw from almost all occupied territory and calling rather generally for a homeland for the Palestinians. At last week's meeting he said very little that he had not said before--somewhere, some time --though now the emphasis was back on help for Israel. Certainly that pleased his audience, but all those zigs and zags might lead to confusion later on.

According to the Jewish leaders at the meeting, Carter said that he had an unswerving commitment to the safety of Israel and that in any peace agreement the Arabs would have to give Israel full diplomatic recognition, including provisions for trade and tourism (which the Arabs have always rejected in the past). His Administration, Carter added, will not draw a map setting boundaries. But to banish some of the Jewish fears about his call for a homeland for the Palestinians, he said that such a haven would have to be a part of Jordan; he did not favor a separate Palestinian state, which could be a threat to peace. A settlement, he stressed, cannot be imposed; it must be negotiated. During a time of crisis, however, there would be no withholding of U.S. arms from Israel "while I am President." On all this, Carter said he was speaking for what he called the strong national consensus on Israel.

Serious Matter. For the President's visitors, these cheering remarks climaxed an energetic campaign to stem what they saw as the Administration's recent "tilt" toward the Arabs (TIME, June 27). In the last several weeks about 1,000 letters a week urging stronger support for Israel have poured into the White House. Important Senators have chimed in on the same theme. Two weeks ago, when he got a phone call from White House Aide Hamilton Jordan, Rabbi Schindler began to discern a change in mood. Says he: "Then I knew that the question of American-Israeli relations had become a serious political matter, and they weren't treating us as if we were part of a foreign relations department. Carter was beginning to perceive the importance of wooing the American Jewish community."

Vance, Brzezinski, Jordan and Stuart Eizenstat, the White House Issues Coordinator, invited individual Jewish leaders to meetings or lunches, fielding their complaints and assuring them that they had nothing to fear from Carter. Mondale had half a dozen meetings with, among others, Schindler and Hyman Bookbinder, the Washington chief of the American Jewish Committee. Although the Vice President had done what one of his staffers called "a lot of reassuring," that was not quite enough. As one of the Jewish leaders dryly noted: "He's not the President."

The White House took the hardly subtle hints and asked the group in to last week's meeting. By that time both the Administration and the Jewish leaders wanted the give-and-take, and afterward both considered it successful. With some understatement, Bookbinder observed: "It cannot be said that the Jewish community has not had access to the White House."

A large reason for that access is the persuasiveness of Rabbi Schindler, who has become the most prominent spokesman for America's disparate Jewish groups. As head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, he has to bridge the differences among 32 groups, which have varying degrees of commitment to religion, Zionism and political action. Sometimes he is also a bridge between the U.S. and Israel. Right after the meeting he flew to Israel, where he had a morning conference with Premier Menachem Begin, followed by lunch with U.S. Ambassador Samuel Lewis. Begin is coming to Washington next week for his first meeting with Carter, and the ultranationalist Premier was concerned about how warmly he might be greeted. No worry. He would be welcomed, said Schindler, "with open arms."

Schindler, 51, who calls himself a moderate but "not a political Zionist," fled Nazi Germany when he was twelve. He earned a Purple Heart as a ski trooper in World War II and graduated from New York's City College before becoming a Reform rabbi. Since 1973 he has been president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, an umbrella group for 750 Reform temples that count a membership of 1,300,000.

He strongly believes that "the American Jewish community has a mind of its own" and that "it has a right to express that mind. The best phrase to express our relationship with Israel is one of independent support. We have a primary devotion to America, and in the constellation of our values, Israel plays a primary role as well. We see an absolute identity between these two. We see no conflict."

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