Meretz USA board members lauded for civil rights work

In a week that saw both Martin Luther King Day and the inauguration of Barack Obama, it is with great pride that the important civil rights work performed by two Meretz USA board members has recently been showcased in the press and on the web.

Rabbi Israel (Si) Dresner, a former President of Meretz USA, was a friend of Dr. King and worked with him closely in the early 1960s. Rabbi Dresner’s friend and colleague, Reverend Ralph Lord Roy, recounts one such episode in their collaboration – in 1962 Georgia – in The New York Times.

Charney V. Bromberg, Meretz USA’s former executive director, and now a lay member of the executive board, provides an account of his days as a civil rights worker in Mississippi in the explosively dangerous days of the mid-1960s. Please click here to read his web publication, which represents the text of a speech delivered in Arkansas under the sponsorship of the Jewish Federation of Arkansas. In particular, Charney recounts his arrest for working to register African Americans voters, in what proved to be the first legal test of the 1965 Civil Rights Act.