Menahem Mendel Ussishkin, the grand old man of the Zionist movement, was honored last night at the dinner given by the Jewish National Fund at the Hotel Astor. About 1,100 attended the $25 per plate affair. As a result of the banquet the Kfar Ussishkin project received great aid and about 100 acres of Palestinian land will be redeemed for the Kfar. Ussishkin, world president of the Jewish National Fund, is in Palestine.
Tribute after tribute was paid by leaders of Jewry, including the Rev. Dr. Stephen S. Wise of the Free Synagogue, Dr. Judah L. Magnes, chancellor of the Hebrew University; Dr. Israel Goldstein, head of the Jewish National Fund in America, who presided last night; Rabbi Wolf Gold, Mizrachi head; Joseph Kraemer, Chaim Greenberg, Norman Hapgood, Mrs. Robert Szold and Louis Lipsky. Greetings came from Secretary of Agriculture H. A. Wallace, Secretary of the Interior Harold C. Ickes, officials of the Jewish National Fund headquarters in Jerusalem, the Zionist Executive in London, Dr. Chaim Weizman and others.
WISE PRAISES USSISHKIN
Ussishkin was described by Rabbi Wise as standing “virtually alone as a great Eastern Jew who uprooted himself out of his native soil and betook himself straight to Palestine without lingering in Europe and permitting the veneer of European culture to stand between his personality and the native culture and genius of Palestine.
“Palestine is not physically trying but it is spiritually testing,” Rabbi Wise said. “Only the fewest of men can stand up under the searching, scorching test of the pioneering years in Palestine. Ussishkin has stood and emerged from that test as completely as any figure in Palestine. Somehow we have felt concerning him that he is granite-as hard, as stern, unyielding, a firm and rock-like figure who in an age of compromising opportunism has stood with all the strength of an indeflectable ideal and an unshakable purpose.”
Commenting on the uniqueness of a dinner honoring someone 5,000 miles away, Dr. Goldstein declared in his address:
“The fifty years of Ussishkin’s service in the Zionist cause mark a period which will go down in Jewish history and in the history of the western world as the false dawn of human hopes. When he appeared upon the Jewish scene fifty years ago, liberty and brotherhood were the slogans of the western world. The emancipation of the Jew in Western Europe seemed to many to be the new day of human rights in which the Jewish woes would at last be healed.”
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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.
