Dr. Emanuel Neumann, chairman of the American Section of the executive of the Jewish Agency, voiced support here today for plans to coopt non-party personalities into the Jewish Agency executive. Speaking at the general debate of the World Zionist Actions Committee here, Dr. Neumann said that he hoped the cooption of personalities who are not members of the Zionist movement would ease what he termed Zionist party rigidity.
Mrs. Rose Halprin, member of the executive of the Jewish Agency, differed with Dr. Nahum Goldmann who had criticized the fact that the Jewish Agency for Israel is required to be registered as a foreign agency in the United States. She said that the procedure was a valid means of defense for American democracy and that it was not directed against Zionists.
Rabbi Mordecai Kirshblum of the New York Agency executive told the session that emissaries from Israel could no longer induce mass aliya but that without them there would not be any aliya at all. Jacob Katsman of New York, general secretary of the Farband Labor Zionist Order, said there was a feeling that the Agency was different from the Zionist Organization. He said that while one Agency boasted about its achievements, the Zionist Organization was being described as ill. He urged that the Zionist movement should be proud and not sell itself short.
Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir declared that Israel was now directing efforts toward absorption of immigrants from western countries but that such Jews were not coming to Israel for financial reasons. Addressing the Actions Committee on behalf of the Government, he declared that most immigrants in the past 18 years had come not out of Zionist motivation but because they wanted to leave their countries of residence.
Adding that Western Jews would come only if the “spark of Zionism is kindled in their hearts,” he said the Zionist movement must stress Jewish and Zionist education. The State of Israel must, in its turn, do everything for absorption of Western Jews, preparing suitable jobs, housing and investment possibilities for them. He lauded the United Jewish Appeal, the Israel Bond campaigns and Youth Aliya for making possible the building up of Israel.
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.
