Avukah Votes Independence of the Jews in Palestine Essential to Idea of Zionism

The national executive council of Avukah, student Zionist organization, meeting in summer session at Camp Scopus on Trout Lake in the Adirondacks, has adopted a resolution in which it declares that “the political independence of the Jewish people on the territory of their historic homeland, Palestine” is absolutely essential to the idea of Zionism. The efforts of the Jewish Labor Federation to develop new forms of economic organization, such as its experiments with socialistic communes, were praised by the student body.

“Avukah adheres in theory to and supports in practice the Basle programme of 1897” the resolution affirmed. “It sees in Zionism the instrument of such national re-birth as will make possible the free and full cultural expression of the Jewish spirit. For that expression, it regards as a sine qua non the political independence of the Jewish people on the teritory of their historic homeland, Palestine. The Avukah supports the efforts of the Jewish National Fund to redeem Palestine’s soil as the inalienable property of the Jewish people”.

A two-weeks summer school in Zionism, which is being attended by over one hundred students from sixteen colleges closes at the camp on Thursday. Lectures have been given by leading Jewish scholars and writers, including Dr. Brodnitz of Germany, president of the Central-Verein of German Jews, who declared that the intensity of the Hitler propaganda in Germany is waning; James Waterman Wise, author and son of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise; Meyer Levin, author of “Yehuda”, and Moshe Burstein, a native Palestinian, now a graduate student at Columbia University, who read a paper on the Palestine Arab.