Issue is taken with Israel’s Premier David Ben Gurion on the question whether Zionist leaders in the United States and Canada should leave their countries for permanent settlement in Israel, in a report to be submitted by Canadian midwest delegates to the national convention of the Zionist Organization of Canada. The convention will open in Toronto Sunday evening with about 500 elected delegates in attendance.
“The Zionist leadership,” the report says, “is far more important an asset to Canadian and American Jewry at this moment and for a generation or two to come, and to Israel on many grounds, if it stays and continues its leadership of Zionists here–contrary to what Ben Gurion has just pronounced in his attacks on the ‘bankrupt’ leadership of U.S. Zionism. It would be catastrophic for Israel and the whole of the program ahead, for the leadership to evacuate North America and leave for Israel,” the report insists.
The midwest delegates’ report also takes the position that the possibility cannot be disregarded of a mass migration from Canada to Israel within 10 to 50 years. It asserts that “there has been no fulfillment of the Zionist movement until every Jew who wishes to live in Israel can have the opportunity to do so.” Ruling out the possibility of a mass emigration from Canada in the near future, the report argues for an intermediate program of fostering chalutziut of trained and skilled talent and technicians.
On the issue of whether the Zionist movement must remain alert in relation to fund-raising for Israel, the report says that fund-raising for the Jewish state would be in constant danger if left entirely in the hands “of those who for some political or ideological reason may decide to terminate their association with Israel.” Organized Zionism, the report adds, must, without endangering fund-raising and money support, not abdicate the field of official spokesman “to the bandwagon supporters.”
The report sees an organized Zionist movement as a “bridge” between Israel and American Jewries to make any future mass transfer to the Jewish state an orderly movement, and to eliminate friction that would result between Israel and certain powerful sectors of American Jewish leadership.
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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.
