A comprehensive program for the sale of Israel bonds in New York was adopted here today at a conference of 2,500 leaders of local Jewish groups and synagogues held at the Hotel Astor. The conference decided to form a “brigade” of 25,000 volunteers to conduct a house-to-house canvass during the week starting March 9.
Addressing the conference, Secretary of Interior Oscar L. Chapman pointed out that “Israel has possibilities of becoming an example to the area of the world in which it is situated of what freedom, coupled with imagination and a will to do, can bring to people. Just as the independence of the United States in 1776 served as a beacon around which many rallied, so, too, the kindling of the flame of democracy and liberty in the Near East may well serve to spread those ideals and ideas which make people everywhere happier.”
Yaacov Shapiro, a member of Israel’s parliament and the Jewish State’s first Attorney General, declared that with American dollars realized through the sale of Israel bonds, Israel would be enabled to exploit the oil and mineral riches of the Negev which, he said, had been kept “under lock and seal so as to avoid all possibilities of development” by the British authorities.
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