WALDMAN, MORRIS DAVID

WALDMAN, MORRIS DAVID (1879–1963), U.S. social worker. Born in Bartfa, Hungary, Waldman was taken to the United States when he was four years old. He lectured at Columbia lumbia University (1916–18). He was rabbi of Temple Anshe Emeth in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1900–03, and in 1906–08 he directed the *Galveston Movement which was created to direct eastern European immigrants from the East Coast of the United States to less populous areas. Waldman was managing director of the United Hebrew Charities of New York from 1908 to 1917, vice president of the New York State Conference of Charities and Correction (1912), president of the New York City Conference of Charities (1915), and in 1927 was president of the National Conference of Jewish Charities. He traveled widely in the United States, setting up federations of Jewish charities to coordinate local Jewish philanthropy. Waldman spent 1921–22 in organizing relief for Central European Jewish communities, and was European director of the war orphans department and of the medico-sanitary department of the Joint Distribution Committee. In 1928 he became executive secretary of the American Jewish Committee, serving until 1945. From 1942 to 1945 he served as executive vice president of the Committee.

Waldman was responsible for many innovations in social work, including the District Service Plan in Boston, geared to serve family units rather than individual members of families; a planned parenthood clinic in Detroit; and bureaus of Jewish education based on the principle of community control. He helped to create the Bureau of Philanthropic Research and the National Desertion Bureau (of which he was the first chairman). He was also instrumental in having a human rights provision put into the United Nations charter. Additionally, he was active in the non-Zionist section of the Jewish Agency for Palestine; in the British-Zionist negotiations on Palestine, he represented the non-Zionist views. He opposed Jewish nationalism which he defined as the "organization of the scattered Jewry of the world into an international political unit or entity," although at the American Jewish Committee he tried unsuccessfully to bring agreement between Zionists and the non-Zionists in the organization. He later favored the establishment of Israel. Waldman's activities are recorded in Not By Power (1953), an autobiography. He also wrote Sieg Heil (1962), about Hitler's treatment of the Jews.