A public reception to Dr. Leon Bramson, president of the International Ort, the society promoting agricultural and technical trades among the Jews of Eastern Europe, was held yesterday in the Hotel Astor. Dr. Bramson arrived from Berlin this week to confer with leaders of American Jewry on the work of providing their destitute co-religionists abroad with opportunities for self-support.
All organizations within the American Ort were the hosts to the leader of the world society Sunday. Dr. Henry Moskowitz, chairman of the American Ort Executive committee, was chairman.
The speakers besides Dr. Bramson were Howard S. Cullman, chairman of the Ort Reconstruction Fund, Judge Jacob Panken, chairman of the American Ort; B. C. Vladeck, chairman of the Peoples’ Tool Campaign; Louis B. Boudin, chairman of the Home Town Industrial Relief Department; Murray Levine, president of the Ort Tool Supply Company; Mrs. Leon Harris, President of the Women’s Association of the American Ort; Paul Felix Warburg, treasurer of the Ort Campaign for Industrial Reconstruction, and Mrs. Ruth Berk, president of the Junior League of the American Ort.
This is Dr. Bramson’s third visit to American since 1922, each time being in the interests of the plight of Jews abroad. For 40 years a leader in Jewish social work in Russia, he was the representative of Russian Jewry in the first Duma founded by the Czarist government. He led the fight for the law established in 1917 which abolished political discriminations against Jews because of their religion. From the overthrow of the imperial regime until the Bolshevik revolution which forced him out of the country, he guided political activities for the benefit of the declassed Jews.
He has interested himself in the Ort’s approach to the problem of the Jews in Russia since his student days at the University of Moscow, agreeing that the best solution to their difficulties would be their adoption of agricultural and technical trades in place of petty shopkeeping, which is now unprofitable and illegal in most of Eastern Europe.
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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.