More than 750 delegates from the United States and Canada, attending the 21st national convention of Farband-Labor Zionist Order, went on record today as favoring top priority for Israel immigration. The convention concluded after reelecting Samuel Bonchek president and Jacob Katzman, national secretary.
Sen. Gale W. McGee (D-Wyo.), speaking at the main banquet session of the convention on Saturday, said that, in the current dispute over pre-war boundaries, Israel should “hang tough and tight against the pressures to return to old boundaries, for the reason that this time we have to make sure that an enforceable arrangement undergirds whatever final settlement may evolve.”
The anti-Semitism “so openly expressed by Negro extremists and by a part of the Negro masses and by even some Negro intellectuals” was criticized at another session of the convention.
The delegates adopted a resolution, asserting that “no amount of justified grievance against the society at large, no amount of frustration, can justify the unleashing of such hatred against the Jews, or for that matter, against any other ethnic or religious group. Neither the human rights nor the dignity of the Negro will be achieved by anti-Semitism.”
The resolution said that it was “incumbent on the enlightened Negro leadership to combat this evil within its own people,” and it also stressed that it was “incumbent on Jewish leadership to combat every manifestation of anti-Negro attitudes and actions on the part of Jewish and other members of the white community.”
Miss Marie Syrkin, member of the Jewish Agency Executive, warned the convention that the “unholy alliance” of extreme right and extreme left in increasing anti-Israel propaganda was an “unwholesome development,” She sharply criticized the recent New Politics convention in Chicago.
The convention also voted to establish the Farband teacher training scholarships for prospective Hebrew and Yiddish teachers as a measure to help combat the teacher shortage. Farband will also increase its awards to college students for excellence in Yiddish, Hebrew and other Jewish studies from 40 to 100 yearly.
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