Creation of New Vocational School Will Highlight 56th Ort Conference

The creation of a new ORT vocational program in New York for young Americans will be reported to the 56th annual national conference of the American ORT to be held Jan. 20-22, it was announced by Harold Friedman, national president. More than 600 delegates are scheduled to attend.

The theme of the conference, he said, will be “Israel’s 30th Anniversary and 30 Yeart of ORT in Israel.” Of ORT’s 80,000 students, more than 50,000 are in Israel, Friedman noted, and there are 86 ORT schools in 33 Israeli communities. “Today, one out of five workers in Israel’s labor force received ORT training,” he said. “It is accurate to say that ORT graduates now comprise the major portion of Israel’s skilled workers.”

Focusing on the new vocational program in New York, called the Division of Technology and Business Administration of the Branson ORT Training Center, Friedman said it was opened last fall to “respond to the changing training needs of Americans who were caught in the vise of technological unemployment. It is the first Jewish vocational school designed to respond to these new needs and opened with 47 full-time and five part-time students. By the end of its first year it is expected that it will have doubled its enrollment.”

Although American ORT, established in 1922, created schools for refugees from Hitler and, later DPs from the Holocaust, the new school with its emphasis on vocational training for Americans in this community, Friedman pointed out, “is quite different. It is now giving 13 courses in its division of business administration and five in its electronics division. Open to man and women, it is keyed not to new arrivals in this country, but primarily to the job requirements of the young adults of the New York community who are the new economically ‘displaced persons.'”