The creation of the “Jabotinsky Prize: Shield of Jerusalem” was announced at a press conference here yesterday. The $100,000 prize is intended to be “The Nobel Prize of Jewish World,” Eryk Spektor, chairman of the Jabotinsky Foundation, a New York-based, non-profit educational organization, declared.
He said that the prize will be presented annually to a man or a woman, Jewish or non-Jewish, who is deemed to have done the most during the prior two years “for the defense of the rights of the Jewish people.”
Spektor pointed out that the “principles behind the Prize assert that a person who protects the legitimate rights of any single group of individuals defends the rights of all people. Therefore, in our view, the Shield of Jerusalem Prize is intended to be a major humanitarian award for service to the Jewish people and, through this, to all of mankind.”
The first Jabotinsky Prize will be presented in New York on November 14 at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, Spektor said.
The recipient of the Prize will be selected by a panel of “distinguished international jurors” from a list of candidates submitted by major Jewish organizations as well as other groups and individuals, Spektor said. He said the jurors this year will include:
Morris Abran, attorney and educator; Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist; Reuben Hecht, an Israeli industrialist; Charlotte Jacobson, president of the Jewish National Fund; Milton Petrie, philanthropist; Judge Simon Rifkind, jurist and attorney; Prof. Henry Rosovsky, dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and Lord Weidenfeld, a British publisher and government advisor.
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