A capacity audience of more than 18,000 New Yorkers filled Madison Square Garden tonight to attend the Chanukah Festival for Israel Bonds in celebration of the Jewish holiday of freedom, which begins at sundown Wednesday. The event was a culminating highlight of the 1966 campaign in Greater New York to raise $20,000,000 through the sale of Israel Bonds to advance the economic development of Israel. Admission to the Festival was through the purchase of Israel Bonds.
A dramatic high point of the Festival was an 80th birthday salute to David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of the State of Israel. The noted actor, Edward G. Robinson, saluted Mr. Ben-Gurion in a reading entitled, “Tribute to a True Maccabee.” Another dramatic high point of the Festival was the readings from the works of Shmuel Yosef Agnon and Nelly Sachs, who share the 1966 Nobel Prize for literature.
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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.