Federation’s Annual Drive Begins As 2,500 Workers Seek to Raise $4,200,000

Twenty-five hundred volunteers took the field yesterday to raise $1,200,000 in the annual fund-raising drive of the Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanth### Societies. The volunteer workers are under the joint leadership of Paul Adler and Benjamin J. Buttenwieser, campaign chairmen. They are divided into 130 committees, each designed to further Federation appeal in a specific trade or profession.

More than 1,000 persons attended the dinner at the Hotel Commodore on Sunday evening to inaugurate the campaign and listened to speeches by Lewis I. Douglas, director of the Federal Budget, Justice Joseph M. Proskauer and other leaders in Jewish affairs. After the dinner the guests heard President Roosevelt’s radio address from Washington on “Mobilizing for Human Needs.”

Justice Proskauer, speaking at the dinner, stated that philanthropic organizations will face their gravest obligations this year in making national recovery a reality for “the millions who have lost courage and confidence through the depression, as well as the sick, aged, orphaned and needy, whose care has always been the peculiar duty of private agencies.” As a measure toward that recovery he urged the universal acceptance of a personal “code,” patterned after the recovery codes in industry, with responsibility to aid the needy, sick and helpless as one of its major planks.

Mr. Douglas warned against hopes that the Government can perform “miracles” in achieving recovery. “No President, irrespective of how great a leader he may be, and no government can accomplish such a miracle,” he said. “We must be patient. And while we are exercising that patience, every individual has a responsibility to perform.” Although the Government has taken over “some of the activities and functions of private philanthropy,” final responsibility for maintaining philanthropic work during the depression must rest on private institutions, he concluded.

Speaking on behalf of more than 750 women volunteer workers in the campaign, Mrs. Felix M. Warburg said in view of the fact that such emergency bureaus as the Gibson and Belmont Committees have discontinued collecting funds and Federal aid only to be given when each locality has done its utmost, the support of the vastly larger part of the community must be enilsted.

Others who spoke at the dinner were: Felix M. Warburg, Paul Adler, Benjamin J. Buttenwieser and Supreme Court Justice Samuel I. Rosenman, who presided.

Justice Rosenman. stressed the fact that the years of depression “have brought their harvest of human suffering. “What we must do for those whose small savings have finally disappeared, besides supplying the bare necessities of living, is to rehabilitate them by all the means at our disposal.”

Governor Herbert H. Lehman, on the advice of physicians was forced to miss his first Federation dinner since the inauguration of the organization. In his message he stressed that Federation not only must be supported but “strengthened in every way possible. Its work is certainly more important now than ever before and demands the support of all right thinking people, even if that support means sacrifice.”