Dr. Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, is sailing tonight on the steamer Olympic following a stay of five months in this country.
Louis Lipsky, president of the Zionist Organization of America, is leaving on the same steamer to attend the plenary meeting of the Executive of the World Zionist Organization which will take place in London on April 6.
The Palestine representatives of the Zionist Executive, Mr. Sprinzak, labor leader, and M. Dizengoff, and Dr. Arthur Hantke, German member of the Executive, are expected to arrive in London to attend the meeting. It is also possible that the General Council, the so-called Actions Committee of the Zionist Organization, will be called at an early date.
Mr. Lipsky will return to the United States in May, prior to the annual convention of the Zionist Organization of America.
It is understood the emergency in Palestine arising out of the economic depression will be considered by the Executive.
In his farewell message to American Jews, Dr. Weizmann stated: “I am leaving America this time with the conviction that a most important milestone has been passed in the progress of our cause towards complete realization. In the course of my present visit, I have been laboring in two important fields: first, in obtaining, in cooperation with my colleagues of the United Palestine Appeal, the necessary means to keep going our work in Palestine, and to enable the land to tide over its present economic difficulties. This has been a work that brooked of no delay and no relaxation. Our hard won positions in Palestine must be maintained and extended and the losses occasioned by an economic depression, an incident from which no country on earth is immune, must be repaired speedily and effectively.
“I have also labored with a view not only to the immediate present, but to the future that lies at our doors and demands a large expansion of our work, that will measure up both to the opportunities at hand and to the great need that presses upon us of providing a stable economic basis in Palestine for as many thousands of our people as the land can possibly absorb. In this sec-second field of my endeavor I believe a great step forward has been made. I believe we are on the threshold of important events. It is natural for those who have little familiarity with objective facts and circumstances to be impatient or critical or skeptical. There are those who want to build Palestine in a day. There are also those who think that fixed views and prejudices can be modified or removed in a day. But I am satisfied that we have made progress and with patience, hard work and good will, an effective union of all Jewry for Palestine will be brought about, a union not only in name or intention, but in deed and achievement.
“Such a union in the form of an all-Jewish Agency for Palestine is moving forward steadily and surely to the status of accomplished fact. It is not because the Zionists are tired or expect others to lift the burden they now carry for their shoulders. They will continue to carry it. We merely want the other sections of Jewry to take up their share of the burden for Palestine for the sake of a Palestine more speedily rebuilt and resting on broader and more secure foundations.
“We begin by taking stock of what has been accomplished. Palestine more perhaps than any other country in the world is open to the inspection of all who care to observe. Jewish work in Palestine is an open book in which all may read. There it stands with all its accomplishments and shortcomings. The Zionist Organization has never sought to hide these shortcomings, and if the general verdict has been that good work has been done, it is because the evidence in all its forms, agricultural settlements, suburbs and towns, schools, health institutions and the University, have been incontrovertible. We desire, however, the verdict not merely of the average observer, not even of the casual trained observer, but the verdict of the best body of observers that can be assembled and brought into the land to study, scrutinize, and report. The proposal to send such a Commission to Palestine is a Zionist proposal. No time will be lost in setting this Commission to its task. The personnel of the Commission is to be of a haracter that will command universal respect and acceptance of its findings. It will examine the work accomplished, it will also prepare plans and projects to guide us for the future. Upon the foundation of the report of this Commission will arise that cooperation of all Jews for which it has been my task to labor persistently and unremittingly and, as the great leader of American Jewry, Mr. Louis Marshall has expressed it, Palestine will become the affair of the entire Jewish people.
“In the meantime, we must not lose sight of the urgent problems of the immediate present. I cannot leave these shores without a last word of hearty appreciation for the never flagging devotion and effectiveness which the Zionists of America, the rank and file as well as the leadership, are laboring to meet the great problems that have arisen. Let them never cease in this devotion, utilizing the instrumentality of the United Palestine Appeal and other instruments for the solution of these problems. I take my leave of them inspired with the hope that they will make possible the speedy solution of the present emergency and that a new chapter of Jewish achievement in Palestine is about to be written.”
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.
