International Council of Christians and Jews

The International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ) is an umbrella organization of 38 national groups in 32 countries worldwide engaged in the Christian-Jewish dialogue. Founded as a reaction to the Holocaust, many groups of theologians, historians and educators dedicated their efforts to seek Christian–Jewish reconciliation. History Background and origins The impetus for the founding of the organisation traces back to the first half of the 20th century, with two significant organisations in the Anglosphere; the American National Conference of Christians and Jews and the British Council of Christians and Jews. The American organisation had been founded by Everett R. Clinchy (a member of the Presbyterian Church in the United States) following the sectarian unrest in the 1920s, instigated by the second Ku Klux Klan of Hiram Wesley Evans and similar groups, against the run of Catholic Democrat, Al Smith, for the Presidency of the United States in 1928. Clinchy sought to create a civic American interreligious organisation arguing for religious toleration, focusing on the three main American religious groups; Protestant, Catholic and Jew. This effort had been immediately preceded in the United States by the interreligious Committee of Goodwill, founded by the ecumenical Federal Council of Churches and B'nai B'rith, a Jewish fraternal organisation.