An American cruiser will be provided to evacuate American delegates to the recently-concluded World Zionist Congress at Geneva if private navigation fails, the United States Embassy today assured Dr. Solomon Goldman, president of the Zionist Organization of America.
On the Embassy’s advice, a large part of the 100-odd American Zionists who arrived here yesterday from Geneva left on chartered buses for Cherbourg to seek accommodations on the Canadian liner Empress of Australia, which was to have sailed for Quebec last night. The group had bookings for the Cunard liner Queen Mary next Wednesday but decided to attempt to depart before then since other sailings of British liners have been cancelled. Among those in the party, besides Dr. Goldman, were Judge Harry M. Fisher, Chicago; Mendel Fisher, New York; Morris Margulies, New York; Rabbi Wolf Gold and Miss Pearl Franklin. Also in the group was Dr. Maurice J. Karpf of New York, non-Zionist member of the Jewish Agency.
Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, Cleveland, succeeded in sailing Friday on a Dutch liner. Rabbi Israel Goldstein, New York, was reported to have sailed yesterday on the United States liner President Roosevelt, thanks to the intervention of Postmaster General James A. Farley, a passenger on the ship.
Efforts to charter a steamship at Marseille for approximately 200 Palestinian delegates stranded in Geneva failed at the last minute. No company was willing to navigate the Mediterranean during the present war crisis.
David Ben Gurion, Eliezer Kaplan and Ben-Zion Mossinsohn, Palestine Zionist leaders, arrived in Marseille after futile attempts to obtain airplane passage from Geneva to Jerusalem and hoped to obtain accommodations on a British steamship to Port Said, whence they would proceed to Palestine.
In order to enable stranded American Jews to secure information permitting the speediest possible return to the United States, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee has established a special department headed by the New York travel agent, Emanuel Rosen.
Telephone communication with all Jewish news centers was becoming more and more difficult. In Warsaw, the J.D.C. was the only Jewish institution permitted to talk by telephone with Paris, for three minutes, during which it advised that there was no tension in Poland.
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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.
