“Brotherhood Week” was first published in Rabbi Avraham Soltes’ collection of prayers, תפלה Invocation: Sheaf of Prayers (Bloch 1959) and dated to February 1951. Over on his blog, Barrio Boychick, Shmuel Gonzales provides the background behind Brotherhood Week:

In 1934 an organization known as the National Conference of Christians and Jews – which was an inter-faith and inter-cultural organization founded in 1927 to “bring diverse people together to address interfaith divisions” – they came up with the idea for Brotherhood Week.

The NCCJ was an organization founded back in 1927 in response the racial nationalism that was rising up in the country, and specifically to respond to the anti-Catholic religious bigotry which at that time had injected itself into the national politics when Catholic politician Al Smith was running for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.

In 1927, The New York Times reported on the founding of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, represented by community leaders from different faiths including US Supreme Court Chief Justices of the United States Charles Evans Hughes, a Catholic; and Associate Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo, a Jew; as well as the “mother of social work” Jane Addams. Their members were committed to bringing diverse people together to address interfaith divisions, race relations, and social and economic barriers between people of different faiths, cultures, and ethnicities.

And for decades they organization would continue to partner Jews and Christians in both public policy and inter-community bridge building.

The rise of Brotherhood Week would be because of the work of three of their spokesmen known as “The Tolerance Trio” – Father John Elliot Ross, Protestant minister Dr. Everett Ross Clinchy, and Rabbi Morris Samuel Lazaron. In 1933 they traveled across the country to rally people together and calling on people everywhere to embrace intergroup understanding. They traveled over 9,000 miles on their mission of brotherhood, and visited with 129 audiences across the nation.

The spirit of all this caught wind of the administration of President Franklin Deleno Roosevelt.

The next year in 1934, the president made an official declaration for “National Brotherhood Week.” Which was to be celebrated towards the end of the month of February; in the 1930s it seems to have been the third week of the month, and by the 1940s it seems to have been celebrated in the fourth week of the month (February 19-28th).

In declaration of this observance President Roosevelt was declared its first Honorary Chairman of National Brotherhood Week. And the NCCJ would continue to sponsor it for over four decades.

However, since the Ronald Regan administration, there has not been any declaration for Brotherhood Week. We have not been able to look to our leaders to set even one week aside to focus on promoting brotherhood in our country, not for the past three decades. And we are all the worse off for it.

Indeed much racial and religious intolerance has injected into politics in recent years. As nationalism and bigotry again raised their ugly heads. We need such a week of focusing on brotherhood and sisterhood in our communities.

I also believe that we desperately need to revive partnerships after the model of the National Conference of Christians and Jews once again.

The NCCJ did not entirely disappear. Though not long after Brotherhood Week came to an end they became re-branded as the National Conference for Community and Justice, in the early 1990s. Keeping the acronym but updating their branding and reconstituted their mission to doing community work “dedicated to fighting bias, bigotry and racism in America.”

For more on Brotherhood Week, find this story at PRI (Public Radio International).

Source(s)

“[Prayer for] Brotherhood Week, by Rabbi Avraham Samuel Soltes (1951)” is shared through the Open Siddur Project with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.

Avraham Samuel Soltes

Rabbi Avraham Soltes (1917-1983) was a Reform Jewish rabbi, the Jewish chaplain at the United States Military Academy in West Point, an author and a leading figure in Jewish cultural affairs. He was born in New York City. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1937 and received a master's degree from Columbia University in 1938. After being ordained in 1942 by the Jewish Institute of Religion (now HUC-JIR), he served as chaplain at Cornell and McGill Universities and then was assistant rabbi at Congregation Rodeph Sholom in Manhattan from 1946 to 1949. He subsequently served as rabbi at Temple Sharey Tefilo in East Orange and Temple Emanuel in Great Neck. He began his service at West Point as a voluntary chaplain in 1963 and was made a permanent member of the staff in 1981. His interests also took him into commerce, and from 1969 to 1974, he was vice president for community affairs of the Glen Alden Corporation, which in 1972 was merged into the Rapid America Corporation. From 1974 to 1977, he was assistant to the president of Tel Aviv University. He was credited with a key role in the establishment of the New York medical division at the university. In 1981, Rabbi Soltes received the Jabotinsky Award from Prime Minister Menachim Begin for his service to Israel. From 1977 until his death Rabbi Soltes had been the spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Chavairuth of Bergen County, in Tenafly, N.J. He participated in many cultural and educational activities that interpreted Jewish art, music and literature. He was chairman of the National Jewish Music Council from 1963 to 1969 and a member of the board of the National Jewish Book Council from 1967 to 1972. Rabbi Soltes, a commentator on Jewish music for American listeners, was the host of a radio program, ''The Music of Israel,'' on WQXR from 1974-1983. Among his writings were Palestine in Poetry and Song of the Jewish Diaspora (Master's thesis HUC-JIR 1942) and Off The Willows: The Rebirth of Modern Jewish Music (1970).

Aharon N. Varady (editing/transcription)

Aharon Varady (M.A.J.Ed./JTSA Davidson) is a volunteer transcriber for the Open Siddur Project. If you find any mistakes in his transcriptions, please let him know. Shgiyot mi yavin; Ministarot naqeni שְׁגִיאוֹת מִי־יָבִין; מִנִּסְתָּרוֹת נַקֵּנִי "Who can know all one's flaws? From hidden errors, correct me" (Psalms 19:13). If you'd like to directly support his work, please consider donating via his Patreon account. (Varady also translates prayers and contributes his own original work besides serving as the primary shammes of the Open Siddur Project and its website, opensiddur.org.)

Works of related interest:

 

[Prayer for a] Nurses’ Commencement, by Rabbi Avraham Samuel Soltes (1951)

[Prayer for a] Teachers’ Commencement, by Rabbi Avraham Samuel Soltes (1951)

National Brotherhood Week, by Tom Lehrer (1965)

שָּׁבוּעַ שֶׁל אַחְוָה לְאֻמִּית | National Brotherhood Week (in Israel), an adaptation of Tom Lehrer’s song by Isaac Gantwerk Mayer

Children’s Prayer for the Recovery of our President [Dwight D. Eisenhower], by Rabbi Avraham Samuel Soltes (1955)

[Prayer for] Little League [Baseball], by Rabbi Avraham Samuel Soltes (ca. 1950s)

[Prayer] in Spring, by Rabbi Avraham Samuel Soltes (ca. 1950s)

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