Menahem Ussishkin, veteran Zionist leader and world president of the Jewish National Fund, the Zionist agency for the acquisition and redemption of the soil of Palestine as national Jewish property, will be honored by American Zionists in a nation wide celebration here, according to plans of the Ussishkin Tribute Roll Committee of the Jewish National Fund of America.
Details of the program adopted by the Eighteenth Zionist Congress and resolutions voted at a recent national conference of all groups and parties held in Philadelphia, were made public by Dr. Israel Goldstein, president of the Jewish National Fund in America, who announced the appointment of Abraham Spicehandler, well known Hebraist and active Zionist worker as chairman of the National Tribute Roll committee.
The Tribute Roll, designed as a leaf, unfolding on a background a drawing depicting the contours of an agricultural settlement in Palestine, provides space for twenty signatures of persons who will pay tribute to Ussishkin on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Their contributions will go toward a sum of $100,000 voted by the JNF national conference as American Jewry’s share in the establishment of Kfar Ussishkin. Contributors of sums from 70 cents or more have a right to afix their signatures on a Tribute Roll which automatically lists them as being among the founders of the new agricultural settlement in Palestine.
Mr. Spicehandler said his committee was successful in securing the cooperation of 227 Zionist units in the metropolitan. area. More than 5,000 Ussishkin Tribute Rolls have been distributed among these groups and the work of gathering signatures accompanied by contributions is well under way. The drive will reach its climax on May 2nd, when the Ussishkin tribute dinner will be held in the grand ballroom of the Astor.
The Committee also announced it will award a free trip to Palestine and return to the volunteer who will have obtained the highest number of signatures on the Ussishkin Tribute Rolls.
The award will be made on the basis of a contest among the volunteers. Those being eligible for participation in the contest are required to gather a minimum of three hundred signatures.
The volunteer winning the free trip to Palestine will be charged with the task of presenting the American volume of Ussishkin Tribute Rolls to Mr. Ussishkin in Jerusalem some time in July or in August of this year. Volunteer Tribute Roll workers will be accepted until June 1st.
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