The 50th. anniversary of the Hibath Zion movement and the 30th. anniversary of the Jewish National Fund have been commemorated at a mass meeting held here.
Herr Kurt Blumenfeld, the President of the German Zionist Federation, said that the men who had fifty years ago gone out to Palestine to build their future there, had not known that they were laying the foundation of the great Zionist movement of today. The Jewish National Fund, whose head, Mr. M. M. Ussischkin, is one of the pioneers of the Hibath Zion and is now celebrating his completion of fifty years of Zionist work, is the expression of the great Jewish striving in Palestine, he went on, and the future of the Zionist work depends on the Jewish National Fund.
Dr. Albert Baer, Chairman of the German Jewish National Fund Commission, said that in the course of the thirty years of its existence, the Jewish National Fund had acquired 300,000 dunams of land in Palestine, a third of the total area in Jewish ownership, as the inalienable possession of the Jewish people, and 65 colonies and many public buildings had been erected on Jewish National Fund soil.
Professor Martin Buber, who delivered an address on “Land and People”, said that land and people go together, but that means something else, he continued, than that a territory belongs to a nation. Nation and territory are political, while people and land are vital conceptions and the striving of a nation to regain its territory grows out of the vital need of a people to link its fate with its soil.
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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.
