Arab intransigence and “indifference” of the great powers to peace in the Middle East drove the late Moshe Sharett to resign as Foreign Minister of Israel in 1956. This was asserted here tonight by Walter Eytan, Israel Ambassador to France, who had been a close friend and associate of Mr. Sharett. Mr. Eytan said that history may show that failure to achieve peace in the Middle East at that time “was the loss of the Arabs, too, not to speak of the rest of the world.”
The Ambassador delivered the first Moshe Sharett Memorial Lecture, under the auspices of Hadassah. The lecture marked the first anniversary of the death of Mr. Sharett, who also had served Israel as Prime Minister and was — at the time of his death on July 7, 1965 — chairman of the executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel.
The meeting — presided over by Mrs. Rose L. Halprin, chairman of Hadassah’ Moshe Sharett Memorial Lecture Committee — also was addressed by Mrs. Mortimer Jacobson, president of Hadassah. Mrs. Jacobson told the distinguished audience of more than 600 representatives of American, American Jewish and Israeli life — which included Avraham Harman, Israel Ambassador to the U.S. — that after Mr. Sharett’s death, the national board of Hadassah established two memorials in his name. One is the annual memorial lecture and the second is the naming of the Moshe Sharett Department of Oncology at the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem.
Mrs. Halprin, in a tribute to Mr. Sharett’s memory, said: “Of Justice Brandeis it was often said that the pattern of his life was that of simple living and high thinking. Of few men in high places can that be said with honesty. Moshe Sharett belonged to that small, elite circle. He walked with dignity. He could face the ups and downs of political capriciousness with the stature which that dignity afforded him. In an age of changing manners and customs he was an example of how the wisdom of the past could be welded with the brightly beckoning new world of the future.”
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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.
