The Union progressiver Juden in Deutschland (UPJ) ("Union of Progressive Jews in Germany") is a registered association, founded in 1997, that represents liberal Jewish organisations. It is headed by Sonja Guentner and has around 3,000 members.
The publication work of the union began in 1997 with Seder ha-Tefillot, the Jewish prayer book by Jonathan Magonet in cooperation with Walter Homolka, from the Hebrew by Annette M. Böckler. In 1998 a Passover Haggadah was published. From 1999 to 2004 Annette M. Böckler translated W. Gunther Plaut's commentary on the Torah into German.
The Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland ("Central Council of Jews in Germany") rejected the association and insisted on a single representative voice for Jewish organisations. In particular this concerned the contract with the government, signed with the Zentralrat on 27 January 2003, and its associated aid money.
In April 2004 open hostility broke out between the Zentralrat's president Paul Spiegel and then chairman of the UPJ, Jan Mühlstein. Mühlstein called for financial equality between the liberal Jewish organisations regarding the distribution of 3 million Euros of state money annually, set by a contract with the government. On 20 November 2005 two Jewish State Associations with numerous congregations of the Union were absorbed into the Zentralrat, after the status of a corporate body of public rights was conferred to them.
Famous quotes containing the words union of, union, progressive, jews and/or germany:
“We hope the day will soon come when every girl will be a member of a great Union of Unmarried Women, pledged to refuse an offer of marriage from any man who is not an advocate of their emancipation.”
—Tennessee Claflin (1846–1923)
“If the Union is now dissolved it does not prove that the experiment of popular government is a failure.... But the experiment of uniting free states and slaveholding states in one nation is, perhaps, a failure.... There probably is an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery. It may as well be admitted, and our new relations may as be formed with that as an admitted fact.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“I don’t have any doubts that there will be a place for progressive white people in this country in the future. I think the paranoia common among white people is very unfounded. I have always organized my life so that I could focus on political work. That’s all I want to do, and that’s all that makes me happy.”
—Hettie V., South African white anti-apartheid activist and feminist. As quoted in Lives of Courage, ch. 21, by Diana E. H. Russell (1989)
“No doubt Jews are most obnoxious creatures. Any competent historian or psychoanalyst can bring a mass of incontrovertible evidence to prove that it would have been better for the world if the Jews had never existed. But I, as an Irishman, can, with patriotic relish, demonstrate the same of the English. Also of the Irish.... We all live in glass houses. Is it wise to throw stones at the Jews? Is it wise to throw stones at all?”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“We are fighting in the quarrel of civilization against barbarism, of liberty against tyranny. Germany has become a menace to the whole world. She is the most dangerous enemy of liberty now existing.”
—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)