J.D.C. Aided Nearly 1,000,000 Jews During 1946; Spent over $58,000,000 During Year

In a year-end review, Edward M.M. Warburg, chairman of the Joint Distribution Committee, announced today that J.D.C. relief, reconstruction and resettlement programs during 1946 had brought aid to nearly one million Jewish survivors overseas in the most extensive assistance activities ever undertaken by a wholly voluntary relief and rehabilitative agency.

Appropriations of the J.D.C. amounted to $58,516,200 during the year, he disclosed. This figure, which more than doubled 1945 grants, is the greatest ever allocated in the thirty-two year history of the Committee.

Chief responsibility of the J.D.C. during 1946 was in Europe, Mr. Warburg noted, where 1,500,000 Jewish survivors of Nazi terror and oppression still live. There, a major undertaking of the organization was the providing of all or part of their food to more than half a million destitute Jewish men, women and children through relief allotments, supplies distributions and in 403 J.D.C.-supported canteens and feeding stations.

J.D.C. activities in behalf of Jewish children — including thousands orphaned during the Nazi rule of Europe -brought direct aid to 85,000 boys and girls including 20,000 orphans living in 243 J.D.C.-supported homes, scattered from Brussels to Bucharest, it was revealed.

Among the most important forms of J.D.C. aid this year, Mr. Warburg said, were those in the field of public health. The relief agency opened and maintained 138 tuberculosis sanatoria, hospitals, dispensaries, clinics and convalescent homes with a total of over 5,000 beds. J.D.C. shipments of medicines and hospital equipment, including $500,000 for medical aid in the Soviet Union, were supplemented by free care in J.D.C.-aided medical institutions and systematic health checks and examinations by physicians and nurses who are members of the J.D.C. public health staff.

In the Committee’s resettlement programs, passage was for approximately 10,500 Jewish men, women and children to Palestine. Four thousand Jewish survivors were helped to leave Germany for new lands while 2,5000 refugees in the U.S. zone of Germany and in Shanghai.

Pointing out that the need for outright relief dominated the J.D.C.’s activities in 1946,” Mr. Warburg said that “now the necessity for full-scale reconstructive help has grown to be an equally urgent need.” Special J.D.C. measures to facilitate economic reconstruction, which will be increased during the coming year, include credit and producers’ cooperatives, the provision of tools and equipment to individual artisans, small loan banks and other assistance, he stated.