Prime Minister Levi Eshkol told 250 delegates attending a convention today of the volunteers who came here to help Israel during the recent crisis that building a state was a full-time job and could not be accomplished on a part-time basis. He urged the volunteers, who came here for limited periods of from three months to a year, to settle in the country.
“We ask you to settle here and to live here with the bureaucracy or to fight the bureaucracy once you’re settled here,” Mr. Eshkol said in reference to complaints of red-tape. He asserted that the international situation would have been different if, instead of two million Jews, there had been four million in Israel. He said that “the real challenge facing the Jewish people today is the upbuilding and the strengthening of Israel. Otherwise, what have we fought for and why have you come here?”
Earlier, Eliahu Dobkin of the Jewish Agency, said that 7,200 volunteers had come to help Israel in the postwar days, of whom 2,000 were British and 707 American. The convention delegates represented 5,500 volunteers here from 41 countries. Mr. Dobkin urged them to sign up for national service of at least a year or for one year of service in the settlements.
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.
