Israel’s Immigration Needs Stressed at Farband Convention

President Johnson appealed tonight to the Farband Labor Zionist Order for “sustained support” of his administration’s efforts to extend American prosperity to “those it has bypassed for much too long.” In a message to the opening session of the Farband’s five-day 21st national convention, the President also lauded the organization for its support of the “wide range of new laws” which “are brightening the lives of all our citizens.”

Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey told the 750 delegates and guests, in a message, that he hoped there would be a “just and lasting peace” in the Middle East, “so that Israel can continue to build her young but ancient nation, enhancing the lives of the exiled whom she gathered from the four corners of the earth.”

Prime Minister Levi Eshkol of Israel said, in a message, that Israel needed a much larger Jewish population for its postwar tasks of developing the economy and consolidating its security. He called for “more aliyah from the free countries, particularly the United States, and the closer involvement of the entire Jewish people in Israel’s future.” He added that he hoped the Farband would consider aliyah “as your most important function at this hour.”

Jacob Katzman, general secretary, said in the keynote address tonight that “aliyah from America is something to which we ourselves must apply our considerable resources, organizing skills and techniques,” adding that this applied “for the whole Zionist movement, indeed for all our central communal agencies.”

He cited the Jewish response to Israel’s May-June crisis and Six-Day War not only from committed Jews but also from those whose Jewish associations were “tenuous or non-existent” and said that “the greatest challenge facing American Jewish organizations and institutions, including Farband,” was “how to keep alive this outpouring of national feeling on the part of most diverse elements” among American Jews, “how to channelize it constructively among the many whose sense of Jewish identity has been reawakened.”