Israel will sell 300,000 cases of Jaffa oranges to West Germany during the current season in the first straight business transaction between the two countries in 15 years.
An agreement signed in Bonn by the German Ministry of Economics and the Israel Purchasing Mission for the shipment of 12,500 tons of fruit by the Israel Marketing Board provides that payment will be half in specified German goods and half in Germany’s foreign exchange surpluses with member nations of the European Payments Union.
Not since 1939 have goods from Jewish Palestine gone to Germany in commercial quantities, but in the ten years preceding World War II, Germany purchased more than 500,000 cases of Jaffa oranges yearly and from 1925 to 1935, Germany was Palestine’s number two customer. In 1933, a peak season, 1,200,000 cases of fruit were consigned to Germany.
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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.