Fisher: General Education in Israel Jewish Education in U.s., Imperative.

Max M. Fisher, chairman of the Jewish Agency’s board of governors, made a two-pronged appeal today for increased American Jewish support of general education in Israel and Jewish education in the United States. Addressing a meeting of the Zionist Organization of America’s Cleveland Region at the Park Synagogue here, Fisher said American Jews must assist Israel in making “more and better education available” to its youth, “especially immigrant children” from Afro-Asian countries, as a major step in helping to close the “social-economic gap” between Israel’s Oriental and Western Jewish communities.”

Fisher, a former general chairman of the United Jewish Appeal and a past president of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, also declared that “most Jewish children in the free countries, our own included, still get little or no Jewish education…If we are not going to teach our young people what it means to be a Jew,” he said, “then we have no right to say we are concerned about Jewish survival.”

At the ZOA meeting. Fisher received the Cleveland Region’s Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver Award in recognition of his “friendship and concern for the welfare and security of the State of Israel.” The presentation was made by Conrad J. Morgenstern, a Cleveland attorney who is president of the ZOA Region. Herman L. Weisman, president of the ZOA, who addressed the meeting, said Fisher “has proven himself as a great force for the commitment of American Jewry to aid the people of Israel, especially in the fields of absorption of new immigrants and education.”

Fisher lauded Israel for making free, compulsory primary school education available to every child, but said more had to be done to help “broaden and strengthen Israel’s educational opportunities.” He also noted that in spite of greater community support and funding of Jewish education in American Hebrew day schools, “we are not doing enough” for Jewish education in the United States and “we cannot afford to let that situation continue.”