$12,110,540 Raised by Hadassah During Year; Convention Hears Report

Hadassah raised a total of $12,110,540 during the fiscal year ending June 30, 1966, delegates to the organization’s 52nd annual convention here were told today. The report was made by Mrs. Max Schenk of New York, the Hadassah treasurer.

Mrs. Siegfried Kramarsky, chairman of the Hadassah Medical Organization Committee in the United States, told the delegates that the organization was establishing a division of child psychology at the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem. The division, first of its kind in Israel, is being made possible by a gift from Herman Dana of Boston, she said.

Dr. Kalman J. Mann, director general of the Hadassah Medical Organization, told the 2, 500 delegates and guests last night that the average life expectancy in Israel had increased to more than 70 years and that the percentage of people above the age of 80 was increasing by two and a half percent annually. Dr. Mann also reported that as the aged segment of Israel’s population increased, so did the number of sufferers of chronic diseases, cancers and emotional disorders.

Including those born incapacitated, he said, there were now 3, 000 child victims of cerebral palsy, 4, 000 cancer patients, 6,000 victims of hemiplegia, 10,000 chronic invalids awaiting hospitalization, and “tens of thousands” of persons “whose lives are cursed by anxieties, phobias and psychiatric problems.”

DELEGATES LAUD PRESIDENT JOHNSON FOR U.S. AID TO ISRAEL

In a special statement, the delegates hailed the “realistic and statesmanlike measures” taken by President Johnson to preserve stability in the Middle East. The statement said that the President’s decision “to enable Israel to acquire deterrent weapons in the United States is evidence of the Administration’s determination to carry out the American commitment to oppose the threat or use of force in the Middle East.”

The convention also expressed satisfaction that Congress “has once again expressed its opposition to giving economic assistance to the United Arab Republic while it continues to acquire vast supplies of sophisticated Soviet weapons, threatening the security of Israel and other neighbors.”

Sen. Edward Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, told the convention that as long as the Arab refugee problem continued and as long as the Arab states “refuse to bend in any way, the threat to Israel’s security will exist.” He called the picture of peace in the Middle East and the security of Israel a “brighter” one. While some Arab leaders “are still dedicated to the destruction of Israel, ” militant Arab leaders “are running into increasing difficulties with more moderate Arab states, ” he said.

Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg of Englewood, N.J., a member of the Graduate Faculty of Columbia University, told the convention that the responsibility of American Jewry today was to preserve the “international unity of the Jewish community, and above all, its continuing lift” in countries outside Israel.