Prime Minister Levi Eshkol of Israel issued a New Year’s message to the Jews of the world in which he fervently prayed that the New Year, “the twentieth of Israel reborn, be a splendid year for the Jewish people – a year of freedom for all our nation, a year of cultural flowering, a year of great uplift and of a great aliyah.”
The Prime Minister recalled the fateful days of the past year and said that when the enemy “was tightening the noose of strangulation around us and opening the assault,” Israel fought alone. “We had but one ally – the Jewish people,” he declared, and noted with pride that “the Jewish people in all the countries of the world came valiantly forward, with all its might and main, to help Israel.”
He warned that while the war was over, “many a hard battle still awaits us” and he stressed that “in the coming struggle we will continue to need the succor of our one ally – the Jewish people” to transform victory into the basis of a permanent peace, and to keep building the Israel of the future.
President Zalman Shazar, in his greeting to the Jews of the world, made a plea for immigration and for development of Israel to enable the country to absorb all the Jews who wished to settle there. He said Jews must not rest “nor allow the world to rest until the governments that now forbid aliyah from their countries revoke that cruel edict and allow those of their citizens who so wish, to join their families in Israel for their own benefit and ours.” He stressed the need for education for Jewish youth.
“He who answered us in days of test and heroism will answer, too, in the years of striving for the unity of the people, the prosperity of the land and the establishment of lasting peace,” President Shazar declared. “May the ancient promise be fulfilled for us: And you shall dwell in the land which the Lord your God giveth you to inherit, and He shall give you rest from all your enemies roundabout, so that you dwell in safety.”
Rabbi Isser Untermann, Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Israel, prayed that the New Year would bring “full redemption to our people, strengthening the light of Israel and of the Torah, and comfort to Zion and Jerusalem.” Israel’s recent travail, he said, had “touched off sparks of belief even in the hearts of those whose belief had been dormant,” and he said “the task for Israel – the State and the Diaspora – is to keep those sparks alive and to join them into a great spiritual force that will give both light and warmth,” The Chief Rabbi also issued a special prayer for the well being of the Jews in the Soviet Union and in the Arab states to be recited in all Israeli synagogues tonight and on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
Rabbi Yitzhak Nissim, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi, rejoiced in his New Year message over the liberation of Jerusalem and declared that “the people of Israel have again become one nation.” He proclaimed the New Year – the first after the redemption of Jerusalem – as “the Year of Jerusalem.”
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.
