Osmond Elim d’Avigdor Goldsmid, who was elected chairman of the Council of the Jewish Agency yesterday, is one of the most prominent Jewish leaders of Great Britain. He has been vice-president of the Anglo-Jewish Association and of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. He is now president of the latter organization. Mr. Goldsmid served with distinction during the war and was twice cited for bravery.
Since its organization he has been chairman of the British section of the Jewish Agency. He is also a member of the Jewish Colonization Association and former high sheriff of Kent. He is also a member of the City Council of Kent.
Dr. Lee K. Frankel, vice-president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, who was elected joint-chairman of the Council, is internationally known for his work in public health and social welfare. Dr. Frankel has been manager of the United Hebrew Charities in New York and a research expert for the Russell Sage Foundation. In 1909 he joined the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company as manager of the industrial department where he introduced a nursing service for industrial policy-holders. When Will Hays was Postmaster General he drafted Dr. Frankel for the task of handling industrial and welfare conditions in that branch of the federal service.
He has been active in the work of the Joint Distribution Committee and he was one of the four commissioners who served on the Joint Palestine Survey Commission. He has also been chairman of the Communal Survey Commission of Greater New York, and a commissioner of the State Board of Charities. From 1923 to 1926 he was chairman of the National Health Council. He is now treasurer of the American Palestine Campaign of the Jewish Agency.
Robert Szold, who is one of the two vice-presidents of the Council, is a prominent New York attorney and chairman of administration of the Zionist Organization of America. Mr. Szold, who has long been active in the Zionist movement, was a member of the Zionist Commission in Palestine in 1919 and also head of the De-Lieme-Szold reorganization commission of 1920. It was the rejection by American Zionists of the report of this body that caused the rift in the leadership of the Zionist Organization of America in 1921 and which was healed at the 1930 convention when Mr. Szold was named head of the organization.
Prominent at the bar, Mr. Szold was the assistant attorney-general of Porto Rico in 1915 and was assistant to Solicitor-General John W. Davis from 1915 to 1919. He was president of the Palestine Cooperative Company between 1922 and 1925, and a former vice-president of the Palestine Economic Corporation and treasurer of the Palestine Endowment Fund.
Professor Herbert Speyer of Antwerp, the other vice-president of the Council, is a former member of the Belgian senate and a leader of the Liberal party. He was one of the founders of the Belgian Pro-Palestine Committee and active in the organization of the Belgian section of the Jewish Agency.
Harry Viteles, one of the five American members of the Executive, went to Palestine in 1925 to become general manager of the Central Bank of Cooperative Institutions in Palestine after a number of years of service with the Joint Distribution Committee. He has also been assistant superintendent of the Federation of Jewish Charities in Cincinnati, superintendent of the United Hebrew Charities in Philadelphia and a special agent of the United States Childrens’ Bureau.
Isaac Berkson, another American member of the Executive, has been director of the department of education of the Jewish Agency for a number of years. From 1917 to 1918 he was the director of the Central Jewish Institute of New York. In the following two years he served as supervisor of schools and extension activities of the Bureau of Jewish Education.
Dr. Maurice B. Hexter, the third American member elected by the Council, was formerly an instructor in the department of social ethics in Harvard and later superintendent of the Federation of Jewish Charities in Mil-waukee. Some years ago Dr. Hexter made an important investigation of immigration possibilities in Mexico for Jews and also served as a representative of the Joint Distribution Committee in Europe and as secretary of the Joint Palestine Survey Commission.
He resigned from the post of executive director of the Federated Jewish Charities in Boston to become a member of the Jewish Agency Executive two years ago. He was the American member of the triumvirate in charge of the Palestine Emergency Fund for which over $2,000,000 was raised in the United States.
The other two members of the Executive chosen by the Council, are Dr. Werner Senator, treasurer of the Jewish Agency, and long active in social welfare work among the Jews of Eastern Europe, and Dr. Bernard Kahn, European director of the work of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Dr. Kahn was general secretary of the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Jueden from 1904 to 1921. He worked to bring order into the planless emigration of East European Jews and to establish the immigrants on a solid economic basis. In 1921 he entered the service of the Joint Distribution Committee and since 1924 has been director of all its European activities.
Dr. Senator was one of the founders of the Jewish Peoples’ Home in Berlin and was later active in the German government’s department for labor welfare. From 1921 to 1924 he directed the Joint Distribution Committee’s work on behalf of Jewish refugees. From 1925 to 1930 he was general secretary of the Committee’s European bureau. Last year he was elected a member of the Jewish Agency Executive in charge of the department of finance.
The five other members of the Jewish Agency Executive are the same persons who constitute the Zionist Executive as elected by the Zionist Congress: Dr. Chaim Arlosoroff, Palestine Laborite; Professor Selig Brodetsky, British General Zionist; Heschel Farbstein, Polish Orthodox Zionist; Emanuel Neumann, American General Zionist and Berl Locker, American Laborite.
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.
