American Jewry will have contributed to the Joint Distribution Committee by the end of this year $19,100,000 through the United Jewish Appeal, Moses A. Leavitt, executive vice-chairman of the JDC, estimated today in a report prepared for the 39th annual JDC meeting which takes place here tomorrow.
Mr. Leavitt added that campaigns currently under way in Latin America are expected to yield about $100, 000 while Canadian Jewry will this year provide an estimated $200,000. By the end of the year, JDC will also have received more than $2,500,000 from a number of other sources, including Swiss reparations, the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization, the Ford Foundation and a number of governmental and intergovernmental agencies.
During this past year JDC relief, resettlement and reconstruction assistance went to some 160, 000 persons in 20 countries on three continents, the report pointed out. For the first 11 months of 1953, JDC appropriated $20,097,540 to meet overseas needs. Included in JDC’s assistance was medical care for some 72,000 men, women and children; cash relief for 14, 300; educational assistance for more than 80,000; feeding aid for 44,500; vocational training for 12, 000; and, despite increasingly rigid immigration laws in most countries of the world, resettlement aid for some 3,500 homeless Jews.
J.D.C. SPENT 60 PERCENT OF ITS BUDGET ON WORK IN ISRAEL
“JDC’s assistance programs shifted with the movement of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, ” Mr. Leavitt emphasized. “The largest overseas Jewish community in which JDC is now carrying on its programs–the community in the State of Israel–has assumed ever greater importance. For aid in Israel JDC assigned nearly one-third of its appropriations in 1951; in 1953 this figure was nearly 60 percent.
“Among the hundreds of thousands who had been aided by JDC to emigrate to Israel there were tens of thousands of newcomers who still required medical aid and other types of assistance–including institutional care–which the Israel Government had called upon JDC to provide. Solit was that by 1953 JDC was expending so much of its overall budget on Malben, the JDC medical and welfare program on behalf of aged, ill and handicapped newcomers to Israel, ” Mr. Leavitt explained.
The JDC is also aiding some 98,000 Jews in six countries in North Africa and in Iran, Mr. Leavitt reported. In Europe, the American Jewish relief organization is giving assistance to 11,000 Jews in Germany, Austria and Italy. In addition, the JDC is still operating today in Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Yugoslavia–countries with a population of nearly 400,000 Jews. In Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, JDC’s activities are carried on almost exclusively on behalf of refugees.
In other European states, JDC provides various types of assistance to the settled Jewish population. In Greece, JDC was called upon to provide emergency relief during 1953 to the members of the Jewish community of Zakhintos following the earthquake there. The total number of beneficiaries in these countries amounts to about 18,000 men, women and children per month. By far the largest of these programs is in France, where JDC is currently assisting 14,000 beneficiaries.
Reporting on emigration aid, Mr. Leavitt said that in the first nine months of the year JDC assisted only some 2,655 men, women and children to find new homes: Australia and New Zealand, 138; Canada, 365; the United States, 1,512; Latin America, 333; Israel, 216 and other countries, 101.
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