Aliya and Zionist information efforts abroad were the items on the agenda of the Zionist General Council meeting which opened at the Hall of Nations here Monday night in the presence of President Ephraim Katzir and Premier Golda Meir. One hundred and ten Council members and visitors and observers from Zionist federations and other Jewish organizations abroad are attending the meeting which will continue through tomorrow.
Katzir shared the dais with Mrs. Meir, former President Zalman Shazar and Dr. Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress. In an address greeting the delegates, Katzir said that Israel would overcome its present difficulties as it has in the past. He said the last few years will be remembered, in Jewish history as the years of Jewish immigration from Soviet Russia. He extended his blessings to Jewish intellectuals hunger striking in Russia for the right to emigrate to Israel and extolled the role of Zionism as ensuring the continued existence of the Jewish people.
Leon Dulzin, acting chairman of the World Zionist Organization, delivered an urgent plea for aliya and improved Zionist information methods abroad. “There can be no Zionism without aliya,” he told the delegates. Referring to the “Aliya Months” currently being observed in various Western countries, Dulzin said that no one fooled himself into believing that they would lead to waves of immigration.
Their aim was to put the issue of aliya squarely in the center of the consciousness of the Jewish people, he said. He scathed the materialism which, he said, had eaten its way into Israeli society in recent years and was contrary to the Zionist vision. He said that with only three million Jews living in Israel, Zionist goals were nowhere near realization.
Dulzin said the Zionist Council was charged with the task of improving information abroad. “We need every drop of sympathy, every thimblefull of understanding, every expression of solidarity,” he said. He said that information efforts should concentrate on explaining Israel’s need for security, on fighting against surrender to Arab terrorists, the Arab boycott and oil black-mail and against cruelty to Israeli prisoners of war. Dulzin said the most vital area of Zionist information work was among young Jews “many of whom are unaccustomed to or unfamiliar with the ideas their elders took for granted.”
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