A total of 4,964 Jewish immigrants entered the United States during the first six months of this year, it was reported here today by Ben Touster, president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. The report, reviewing six months’ activities of the organization, said that 2,190 of the Jewish immigrants were discharged to HIAS by U.S. immigration officials.
“The desire to become American citizens and to be integrated into the life of their new land runs high in these immigrants, and a large percentage avail themselves without delay of the opportunity to file their applications for citizenship.” Mr. Touster said. “During the first six months of this year 3,479 persons applied for their first and second citizenship papers through HIAS offices,” he declared.
Thousands of relatives both here and abroad, Mr. Touster stated, still seek to be reunited with kin with whom contact had been lost as a result of the war. He revealed that since 1944, the HIAS location service has been successful in finding more than 150,000 persons sought throughout the world, many of whom had long been given up for dead.
Emphasizing the activities of the HIAS overseas offices during the first six months of 1952, Mr. Touster stated that the European offices of HIAS had arranged for the emigration of 2,263 migrants during this period of time. More than half of them came to the United States. Canada received the next greatest number, 560, and the balance was divided among Latin America, Australia, Israel, and other countries of destination.
He called attention to the large number of pending immigration cases in the HIAS European offices, amounting, in France, to a total of 10,633, in Belgium to 5,159. Germany and Austria accounting for 1,263, and the rest divided among Holland, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and England, making a grand total of 20,468. The HIAS president stated that “the position of most of these people, waiting in Europe amidst surroundings often hostile, usually forbidden by law to engage in gainful occupation, and separated by the ocean from their only remaining kin, was precarious and pitiful in many instances.”
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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.
