President Isaac Ben Zvi, in a New Year’s message, extended the best wishes of the people of Israel “to all our brethren of the House of Israel, wherever they may be, to all who seek the welfare of the State of Israel and help in furthering the State’s progress and in gathering within its boundaries the scattered sons of our people.”
He declared that the task of the Jewish people “for the coming decade was “the restoration of our people and the building up of our homeland.” Noting that the current Jewish year came to a ciose with “a call for peace” from “the lofty heights of the General Assembly” of the United Nations, the President of Israel said: “We are all need of genuine peace, in particular our people, building its future not on the foundations of hostility and bloodshed, nor on plans for the ruin of others and domination by the sword” but on the foundations “of the equality of man as man, in the spirit of our prophets.”
Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, in a message to American Jewry released through the United Jewish Appeal in New York, said that the people of Israel joined him in sending the “warmest Rosh Hashanah greetings and best wishes for the year ahead. Recent events in the Middle East have underlined the stability of Israel and its unswerving dedication to rehabilitating a people and developing the land while neighboring states have undergone violent upheavals.”
He warned that “the dangerous implications of those events to the security of Israel cannot be ignored. We have therefore been obliged to take rapid and costly steps to strengthen our security. But this has had necessarily to be at the expense of urgent needs connected with the absorption of masses of immigrants requiring additional resources. I am sure that our good friends in the United States whose support of UJA is so devoted will recognize the urgent needs of the moment and will do their utmost to enable us to absorb and advance the welfare of our immigrants without interruption.”
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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.
