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Children from Europe Brought to Palestine Are All Mental Problems, Dr. Yassky Reports

December 19, 1944
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Dr. Haim Yassky, director of the Hadassah medical system in Palestine, disclosed at a press conference here today that among the children brought to Palestine since the war, there are none without mental problems. He added, however, that their rate of recovery is rapid. Adults are slower to recover, and it is too early to know at what rate they will improve, he said.

Dr. Yassky estimated that the expenditure of $1,000,000 a year for 100,000 Jewish refugees in the places from where they will go to Palestine “could provide them with a good start on the road back to recovery even before they set foot in the Holy Land.” He said that from five to ten percent of those admitted were affected with tuberculosis, the rate being highest among those coming from Transnistria, where living conditions were worst, and that although there are now 6,000 active and arrested cases in Palestine there are only 190 institutional beds.

Dr. Yassky disclosed that a group of sixty Jewish health and social welfare workers represented on the Cairo Council of Voluntary Agencies is preparing to do relief work with United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in the Balkans. He revealed that the World Jewish Medical Association, at the instigation of the Jewish Medical Association of Palestine, is collecting material from all over Europe as to the amount and details of experimentation on human beings by the Nazis, but that it is already known that the Nazis tested out gases for military purposes, and that children’s blood was taken for the German Army’s blood bank.

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