The activities of the Israel Government and the Jewish Agency in Jewish communities outside of Israel will be overhauled, modernized and expanded, Haim Yahil, head of the Israel Foundation for Cultural Relations in World Jewry, announced yesterday.
He said that such efforts have been concentrated on emergency areas and geared to the needs of the pre-state period. Top priorities in such efforts, he declared, have now been assigned to work among intellectuals and college students. He estimated that the total of such Jews in the United States alone was around 300,000.
Mr. Yahil said that the best method of enlisting their interest in Jewish affairs was to attract them to visit Israel. For that objective, he said, the Foundation and the Hebrew University were setting up committees to increase the number of Jewish students coming to Israel.
He reported that the Foundation had decided to abolish the criterion of party membership as a key for selecting emissaries to visit Jewish communities abroad. To expand the program of contact with Jewish intellectuals, he said, the Foreign Ministry has decided to station four additional cultural attaches abroad. These will be sent to Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia; while a second cultural attache will be assigned to Paris.
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