Jewish Leaders Participate in Memphis March, Will Attend King Funeral Today

Scores of Jewish leaders, as individuals and as representatives of major organizations, participated today in the memorial march in Memphis, Tenn., for the late Rev, Dr. Martin Luther King, the Negro civil rights leader slain by an assassin in Memphis on Thursday. Many more will join the funeral procession for Dr. King in Atlanta, Ga., tomorrow.

Virtually every national Jewish and Zionist organization in the country issued statements of profound grief on Dr. King’s death. Many leaders sent personal messages of condolence and sympathy to Mrs. King and members of her family. (In Paris today, Grand Rabbi Jacob Kaplan of France sent a telegram of condolences to Mr. King. “The entire Jewish community of France participates in your mourning,” he said.)

(In Washington today, community services memorializing Dr. King were held at the Washington Hebrew Congregation where Rabbi Richard G. Hirsch, head of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, described the late civil rights leader as “the righteous man of our generation” and “the most American of Americans.”)

The Israel Bond Organization announced that its offices in New York and across the nation would be closed tomorrow in honor of Dr. King.

An emergency session of the leaders of Operation Connection, an inter-religious coalition of which the American Jewish Committee is a member, called on Congress yesterday to remain in session until legislation is passed that adequately meets the needs for jobs, housing, health and poverty funds and eliminates crippling social welfare amendments. The group sent a delegation to Memphis today and urged massive financial support for a Martin Luther King inter-religious memorial fund.

Norman A. Levine, chairman of the B’nai Zion Bill of Rights Conference, announced that the fraternal order would plant a grove of 1,000 trees in the Kennedy Freedom Forest bearing the name of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.