— Jewish communities are concerned with growing anti-Semitism in Latin America and Europe, but “the silent Jew of Bobi Yar and Kristallnacht is no more,” Leon Dulzin, chairman of the Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization Executives, said here.
Dulzin, who is in New York for a series of meetings with the top echelon leadership of the United Jewish Appeal, came here directly from an international meeting in London with some 90 of the foremost Jewish leaders from 13 countries. He said that the meeting in London “displayed a Jewry that is courageous, determined, able and concerned with anti-Semitism and ready to fight back. The Jew today, appropriately for this Chanukah season, has the spirit of the Moccabees and the grit of Entebbe.”
The vigorous and united response of French Jewry to the bombing of the Rue Copernic synagogue in Paris in October “is direct evidence of how the spirit and bravery of Israel, as shown in its war to win independence, and in 1956, 1967 and 1973 to preserve it, has influenced and strengthened diaspora Jewry as well,” Dulzin said.
While in the United States the Zionist leader will participate in joint meetings of the Jewish Federation and the UJA in New York; of the UJA in Cleveland Cincinnati, Los Angeles; and at a regional conference in Orlando, Fla. In New York he will also meet with the WZO-American Section to discuss the WZO Board of Governors meeting that will convene in Israel next February.
GRATIFIED WITH UJA CAMPAIGN
Dulzin expressed gratification with the progress of this year’s national UJA campaign. “I am impressed with the devotion, the dedication and the ability of the American Jewish leadership,” he said. “Their outstanding efforts are producing a considerable increase over last year’s receipts at this time. The American Jewish community has risen to the serious economic challenge to the well-being of Israel.”
Dulzin said that one of the problems he will discuss with American Jewish community leaders is “the catastrophic fall in Soviet Jewish emigration.” He noted that in the last two months the number of Soviet Jews permitted to leave “has been cut almost to the vanishing point, and it is with heavy heart that I say that the very future of emigration is now endangered.”
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