The Palestine Government has extended for three months the validity of more than 5,000 unused immigration certificates under the former schedule, it was learned today. The action followed appeals from the Jewish Agency. The Jews to whom the certificates were issued have not yet been able to use them because of wartime travel difficulties.
The Jewish Agency, it was learned, is making efforts to obtain transit for 1,500 immigrants with certificates who are still in the Baltics. The first group, from Sweden and Denmark, is expected to arrive soon.
A total of 20,000 Jews entered Palestine in the 16 months since the beginning of the war, Elishu Dobkin of the Jewish Agency reported to a conference of the World Union of Poale Zion-Hitachduth at Ayanoth. They included 8,700 in various quota categories and more than 10,000 refugee illegal immigrants.
Dobkin added that the Palestine Government had turned over to the care of the Agency more than 7,500 illegals after they had served six months internment and that 2,400, including some 1,600 survivors of the sinking of the S.S. Patria on Nov. 25, were still in the Athlit camp.
The Patria death toll reached 72 today when four more bodies, including Max Zwillinger, 49, of Vienna and three unidentified women, were recovered from the submerged ship.
The Ayanoth conference adopted resolutions calling for continuation of the organization’s work in occupied European countries, demanding that American Jews increase their assistance to suffering European Jews and asking strengthening of the World Jewish Congress to make it an authoritative representative body.
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