B’nai B’rith Women Contribute $250,000 for Its Children’s Home in Jerusalem

The B’nai B’rith Women contributed $250,000 today for construction of a new building for older troubled boys at its Children’s Home in Jerusalem. The 140,000-member organization is holding a four-day triennial international convention and diamond jubilee celebration here. Some 700 delegates will be in attendance through Wednesday. The new building will open in September for the treatment of around 20 boys aged 15 to 18. It will include a gymnasium, music and science rooms, a library, psychotherapy facilities, a clinic and a sickroom. Latin American chapters of B’nai B’rith Women will finance the new addition to the Children’s Home, which was founded in 1943 to treat victims of the Holocaust. At today’s ceremony, a local housewife, Mrs. Selma Hurwitz, donated to the home an artistic panel with the biblical quotation “He who walks uprightly walks securely.” Mrs. Michael Shapiro of Washington, outgoing president of B’nai B’rith Women, received a silver kiddush cup and plate from B’nai B’rith president Dr. William A. Wexler. Messages from President Nixon and Israeli Premier Golda Meir were read.

Yecheskiel Cohen, director of the Children’s Home, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the institution now houses 70 boys and girls aged 9 to 14. “We not only seek to educate and treat our children,” he said, “but to create a new life for them.” Cohen said he and his staff “realize the shortcomings of an institution,” but noted: “As far as I can judge, these disturbed boys cannot go to foster homes. They are too aggressive, have no trust in anyone, and can’t have a relation with a small family because the family can’t stand them in their aggressiveness.” The new wing will be devoted largely to boys who are failing in foster homes. Cohen, who was born in Germany in 1932 and immigrated to Palestine with his family in 1938, will visit institutions similar to his in New York, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago and Topeka before returning home. At the opening of the convention last night Mrs. Rita E. Hauser, the United States representative on the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, contended that the status of Israeli women “surely influenced” Palestinian women-including Haifa-born hijacker Leila Khaled-to revolt for equal rights with men.