Arab Newspapermen’s Conference

A conference of Arab newspapermen will be held at Haifa, December 28.

Formal announcement has been made by National Chairman David A. Brown. in a letter to state and local officers of the official closing, on December 31st, of the Twenty-five Million Dollar United Jewish Campaign for the reconstructive relief of the Jews of Eastern Europe and other lands.

At the same time, Mr. Brown made it clear that notwithstanding all of the splendid work which has been done by the Joint Distribution Committee with upward of $15,000,000 in cash that has been paid in up to the present time by subscribers to the United Jewish Campaign, since it was launched at a national conference held in Philadelphia on September 12th, 1925, the Jews of Eastern Europe, including Russia, are still in dire need of help from their American brethren.

“Unquestionably fifteen million dollars is a colossal sum of money,” Mr. Brown said, “and the fact that this enormous sum has been given is the best demonstration of that feeling of kinship, of deeply imbedded sympathy with their fellow Jews that is lodged in the heart of the Jews of America. The work which the Joint Distribution Committee has done with this money is concededly the greatest piece of humanitarian engineering in history. Beginning with milk for starving babies, bread for hungry men and women, bandages for the wounded and medicine and hospitals for the sick the scope of the Joint Distribution Committee’s ameliorative and reconstructive endeavors include the economic and spiritual rehabilitation of millions over whom the steam-rollers of war, of flood, fire and drought of financial disaster have passed relentlessly and in appalling succession, includes the establishment of tens of thousands of Jews as farmers, the erection and maintenance of trade, industrial and professional schools, the rehabilitation and maintenance of Yeshivas and Rabbinical academies, the creation of a vast net-work of 695 credit-cooperatives to which over three hundred thousand Jews in thirteen countries look for financial aid in their efforts to rehabilitate themselves as producers, another vast net-work of Gemilath Chasodim societies-where other hundreds of thousands of Jews can obtain small loans without interest.

“Without these great regenerative enterprises the Jewish situation in Europe would have been one of stark hopelessness. The Joint Distribution Committee has given to the suffering millions, a hand-hold of life, and the Jews of America should be happy in the knowledge that it is due to their generosity that this has been possible. But the Jews of America, and especially those who have yet to complete payment of their pledges to the United Jewish Campaign must realize that this hand-hold is at best a very precarious one; that time and again, due to factors over which neither the Jews of Europe of we in America can have any control, the hand-hold has been all but broken.

“Against all of these soul-crushing, heart-breaking odds the Jews are manfully struggling to make their handhold on life strong, secure. If we stand by them, if we extend to them the help that their valiant struggle to survive entitles them to, they will succeed. That is, they will succeed to live. If we abandon them, if we permit ourselves to feel that the fifteen millions already given should suffice, if we allow a temporary situation in this country to stand between us and them, then much that has been done for them will have been in vain, and we, after tantalizing them with a vain hope of survival will doom them utterly. This knowing the Jews of America as I have come to know them during the years that they have cooperated with me in this life-saving enterprise, I am sure they will not do.”

FORM COMMITTEE TO CONTINUE FALASHA EDUCATIONAL WORK

A new committee that is to conduct a propaganda among American Jews on behalf of the educational work being done for the Falasha Jews in Abyssinia was organized at a conference of the American Pro-Falasha Committee on Tuesday in the Community House of Temple Emanuel. Among those who spoke of the importance of the work were Dr. Cyrus Adler, president of the American Jewish Committee, and Dr. Jacques Faitlovitch, who first discovered the Falasha Jews of Abyssinia and who has been conducting a school in Addis-Abeba, the capital, and has been doing other educational work among them for the past twenty-five years.

Ways and means of raising funds in this country in order to continue the work were discussed at the conference, at which Hyman J. Reit presided.

JEWISH WOMEN EQUIP SYNAGOGUE AT STATEN ISLAND CITY HOSPITAL

A synagogue to meet the needs of the Jewish patients at the municipal hospital at New Brighton, Staten Island, has been equipped by the constituent organizations and individual members of the Federation of Jewish Women’s Organizations, Inc. of Greater New York. The room now used for a synagogue had been previously set aside by the city at the request of the Jewish patients.