Hadassah Leaders Attend Ground-breaking for Moshe Sharett Institute

Hadassah leaders attended ground-breaking ceremonies here today for the new 6 million pound ($1.7 million) Moshe Sharett Institute, an addition to the Ullman Center for cancer and allied diseases at the Hadassah Hospital. The ceremonies followed the first working session of Hadassah’s mid-winter conference which opened in Jerusalem last night.

Half of the money for the Sharett Institute, named in memory of Israel’s first Foreign Minister and later Prime Minister, was contributed by the Ullman Foundation. Hadassah will raise an additional 1.5 million pounds ($430,000) for a building maintenance fund. Israel’s Minister of Health, Israel Barzilai, who attended the ceremonies, noted that cancer accounts for 1.8 percent of all deaths in Israel.

Earlier today, Prof. K. Mann, director general of the Hadassah Medical Organization, announced that the Hadassah Hospital’s open heart surgeon, Dr. Joseph Borman, will be sent to Cape Town, South Africa, to study heart transplant techniques, probably with Dr. Christian Bernard whose surgical team performed the first human heart transplant operation in medical history. Dr. Borman was born in South Africa.

Foreign Minister Abba Eban, addressing the opening session last night, declared that the Middle Eastern nations must cooperate more among themselves and depend less than they traditionally have on outside powers to determine the fate of the region. He sharply criticized President Tito, of Yugoslavia, for his attempts to promote a Middle East peace formula at variance with the United Nations Security Council’s resolution of Nov. 22, 1967. The Tito plan is a version of the non-aligned nations’ formula which was rejected by the U.N. last summer. It called for unconditional Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories in return for an Arab statement of non-belligerence. The notion that Israel relinquish the occupied territories without a firm peace treaty is a “prescription for renewed hostilities,” Mr. Eban declared.

Meeting with newsmen before the conference, Mrs. Mortimer Jacobson, Hadassah president, announced that a Youth Center will be opened among the Hadassah buildings now being restored on Mt. Scopus to cater to American college youth. These young people, she said, would spend a year of study there in courses accredited by American universities. Some of them may stay on in Israel and others will return to the United States to become Zionist leaders, she said. The Mt. Scopus buildings, the original site of the Hadassah Hospital and the Hebrew University, were cut off from Israel for nearly 20 years following the occupation of Mt. Scopus by the Jordanian Arab Legion during the 1948 war.

Mrs. Jacobson also described an adult movement recently established in the United States by college graduates who want to settle at Tsur Hadassah, near Jerusalem. Most of them are music graduates, she said, and want teaching jobs in Israel. She also noted that Hadassah is devoting greater efforts to place Youth Aliyah children in kibbutzim and establishing proper educational facility for them.