Funeral services will be held here tomorrow for Bernard A. Rosenblatt, a life-long Zionist and the first American elected to the World Zionist Executive in Jerusalem, who died here yesterday at the age of 83.
Born in Poland, Mr. Rosenblatt came to this country at the age of five and graduated from Columbia University Law School in 1909. In 1919 he accompanied Felix Frankfurter to the Versailles Peace Conference to assist his efforts to have a clause included in the Palestine Mandate opposing land speculation. He became a New York City magistrate in 1921 and was elected to the World Zionist Executive that same year. He floated the first Palestinian municipal bonds in the United States, the forerunner of the Israel Bond campaign. Mr. Rosenblatt served at various times as president of the Jewish National Fund and Keren Hayesod and was a vice president and honorary Secretary of the Zionist Organization of America. He was an officer of several Jewish business enterprises in Palestine and was the first president of the American Zion Commonwealth, a land purchasing and settlement agency he founded in 1915 which established the communities of Balfouria, Afule and Herzlia and the Haifa Bay Settlement in Palestine. Mr. Rosenblatt’s autobiography, “Two Generations of Zionism.” was published here in 1967. He will be buried in Haifa next to the body of his wife, Gertrude, an organizer of Hadassah, who died in 1955.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.