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A large group of rabbis spanning Judaism’s religious movements says it has an answer to the vexing question of how to send China an Olympic-sized message without harming the interests of athletes or Israel.

In an appeal issued April 30 and timed for this week’s commemoration of Yom Hashoah, 185 Jewish leaders — mostly clergy — appealed to Jews not to attend the Beijing Olympics this summer as tourists.

The next day, the Anti-Defamation League rejected the boycott call and said comparisons the clergy statement made to the 1936 Berlin Olympics were inappropriate. Three Orthodox groups — the Orthodox Union, Agudath Israel of America and the National Council of Young Israel — also in recent days rejected the boycott idea.

China is the principal power propping up the regime in Sudan, where government-allied militias have murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Darfur region. It is also cracking down harshly on independence movements in Tibet.

Jewish groups have played a disproportionate and lead role in drawing Western attention to the Darfur killings. Yet deciding whether to confront China, which enjoys thriving trade with Israel, presents a more complicated set of issues than attempting to isolate Sudan, a poor country that does not want relations with the Jewish state.

The appeal is cast narrowly, organizers said, as a way around such dilemmas that other groups and nations have faced in determining how to confront the Chinese over human rights abuses while not harming athletes and national interests.

Organizers of the statement said they also did not want to harm athletes. The wholesale U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics is now considered a failure that hampered athletic careers more than it moved the Soviet Union to change its policies on Afghanistan.

Two of the coordinators of the petition, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Manhattan’s Kehilath Jeshurun synagogue and Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, the former chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Council, saw an opportunity when they learned that China was preparing a kosher kitchen for the Olympics.

“Beijing’s authorization of the creation of a kosher kitchen at the Olympic village is apparently intended to help attract Jewish tourists to the games,” the statement said. “Jews should not be party to the whitewashing of such a regime, kosher kitchen or no kosher kitchen. Regimes that practice or enable oppression, terrorism or genocide are not kosher.”

The Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which took part in preparing the statement, noted that Germany used the 1936 Olympics to diminish the world’s awareness of the impending Nazi threat.

“We remember all too well that the road to Nazi genocide began in the 1930s with Hitler’s efforts to improve the public image of his evil regime,” the statement said.

“Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, called the 1936 Games ‘a victory for the German cause.’ We dare not permit today’s totalitarian regimes to achieve such victories.”

The ADL statement rejected such parallels.

“We believe that these comparisons are inappropriate,” its statement said. “China is a complicated society that is changing and opening up in many ways, and one simply cannot equate the Beijing Olympics with those games in Nazi Germany on the eve of the Holocaust.”

It added, “While there is no doubt that China has an extremely poor human rights record and that its actions in Tibet and Sudan are to be condemned, we believe that asking the Jewish community to engage in a boycott of the games could be counterproductive and would not produce any tangible result.”

Ultra-Orthodox umbrella group Agudath Israel of America said it is “presumptuous, and perhaps even counterproductive, for a group of private citizens to urge a boycott of the Beijing Olympics — and to direct their appeal specifically at members of the Jewish community.”