Upa Hits Hollander Plan to Delay Allocations from 1941 Drives

The United Palestine Appeal today made public a resolution adopted by its Administrative Committee expressing disapproval of the request issued to welfare fund communities by Sidney Hollander, president of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, urging them to withhold making commitments on their 1941 campaigns until a budgeting body, which Hollander has proposed, is established to recommend allocations to local communities. The text of the resolution follows:

“Having consistently given its unreserved support to the policy of established local welfare funds in which, through a single campaign, all communal obligations and overseas responsibilities of American Jews are pooled and distributed; and having cooperated with the Council as a federation of representatives of the welfare funds was intended to be an impartial, fact-finding body interested in servicing its member agencies with dependable reports; and the Council having on various occasions indicated that it could not undertake to assume the function of determining allotments either as between the national fund-raising agencies or in the local Jewish communities;

“The Administrative Committee of the United Palestine Appeal is in duty bound to express its profound disapproval of the action taken by the president of the Council, who has seen fit at this time to give notice to all member agencies of an intention on his part to propose at the Atlanta conference of the Council that it set up its own budgeting body to recommend allocations to its member agencies in making their 1941 commitments; and further, urging all welfare funds to await the recommendations of such a body before completing their local 1941 budgeting.

“The United Palestine Appeal is constrained to lodge its protest against this premature action on the part of the president of the Council, on the ground that it seeks to arrogate to the Council the function of decision in matters of budgeting, and that if its President’s advice were followed, it would at once paralyze the 1941 campaign of the United Palestine Appeal–as well as of other bodies–until the so-called budgeting body would render its report, which could not be presented before late in 1941.

“The United Palestine Appeal must emphasize its unqualified opposition to any such program. We question the right of the president of the Council to advise communities to withhold making their budget until they have heard from the Council, and we give notice that we intend to apprise our friends throughout the country of the destructive consequences that must flow from the proposed transformation of the Council from an impartial to an interested body, and from its unwarranted and unprecedented interference with the normal progress of local 1941 campaigns throughout the country.”