Expect 20,000 at Opening of ‘circle’ Parley

Nearly 1,000 delegates from all parts of the United States and Canada will attend the thirty-fifth annual convention of the Workmen’s Circle, which opens today (Sunday) at Madison Square Garden and continues through May 11.

More than 20,000 persons are expected to attend the opening session and will hear addresses by Abraham Cahan, editor of the Forward, and B. C. Vladeck, business manager of the publication, and reports by J. Weinberg, president, and J. Baskin, general secretary of the Workmen’s Circle, on the year’s activities of the organization. Thereafter, daily meetings of the convention will be held at the St. Nicholas Arena, 53 West Sixty-sixth street.

The Workmen’s Circle was founded thirty-five years ago, by a group of Jewish industrial workers who desired to provide educational and welfare activities for themselves and their associates, through funds contributed out of their own earnings. Through three and a half decades, the organization, established to create a means of help for workingmen, as a substitute for dependence on public or private philanthropy, in times of need and emergency, has grown to hundreds of thousands of members in branches throughout this country and Canada. Its original educational and social welfare program has been expanded to include a tuberculosis sanitarium at Liberty, N. Y., where 3,000 persons have been treated for tuberculosis; educational activities, children’s camps, schools, forums, sick and death benefits, and unemployment aid.

During 1934, it expended approximately $1,000,000 for its varied activities, including $320,000 for sick benefits, $200,000 for deaths, $150,000 for the sanitarium; $100,000 for aid to unemployed members. It also appropriated $150,000 for the upkeep of children’s and adults’ summer camps near New York City, and $70,000 for educational work.