Over 400,000 Collecting Boxes are to be found in Jewish homes the world over, the Head Office of the Jewish National Fund reports in a summary of its statistics for the year 5684 just concluded. Fifty countries use the boxes as a means of collecting funds for land purchase in Palestine. The sums yielded vary from £35 in a Cape Town Box to a few shilling in East London Boxes.
That there is still much room for extending the Collection Box System is seen from the fact that excluding Russia and other provinces where Zionist work cannot be carried on, there are boxes in only one out of every seven Jewish families in the world, assuming the latter to reach the number of 2,600,000. This figure is based on a division of the number of Jewish persons by five, the average size of a family.
In England and South Africa there are enough boxes for half the Jewish population not allowing for losses: in Germany more than a third of the Jewish families have boxes. While Japan has none, Singapore has 100, or one for every Jewish family; two-thirds of Finland’s Jewish families have boxes. They are used in Australia as well as Ireland, China as well as Canada.
For the most part only small coins are placed in the Boxes but they yield about 14 per cent of the gross income of the Jewish National Fund.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
