Reform leader to RJC: Ask candidates about gun violence

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, calls on Jewish Republican leaders to ask the party’s presidential candidates about gun violence.

Jacobs makes his appeal in an open letter to the Republican Jewish Coalition on the day of its forum for all 14 GOP presidential candidates.

In the letter addressed to the RJC’s national chairman and executive director, Jacobs calls on the organization to ask each candidate what they would do to end the “epidemic” of American gun violence.

“As you know, yesterday’s brutal slaughter of 14 people in San Bernardino is, to our great national shame, only the latest mass shooting. There is certainly room for disagreement about the best way to end gun violence. But I hope we can all agree that there is no room for disagreement that the status quo is flatly unacceptable,” Jacobs writes, calling it an “appropriate issue” for the American Jewish community.

— JTA