Jewish Agency Assembly Highlights

The expected arrival of 70,000 immigrants this year most of them from Soviet Russia, confronts world Jewry and the Jewish Agency with their greatest financial challenge, Louis Pincus, chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, declared in his keynote address at the opening session of the second annual General Assembly of the Jewish Agency.

“Let us be aware of the role destiny has asked us to play,” Pincus said, “Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Jews from the USSR and other Communist countries look to us; Jews of the dispersion, free and uncertain, pray that we give strength to the Israel of their dreams,” he said.

Paul Zuckerman, chairman of the United Jewish Appeal, predicted that the UJA effort in 1973 would outdo the record-breaking campaign conducted in 1972. “To be tired of the vision of an Israel free-of slums and poverty…an Israel secure and peaceful within recognized borders, and an Israel standing like a rock with her gates open to every Jew who seeks freedom and dignity–is to be tired of everything in life that makes it worthwhile,” Zuckerman said at the General Assembly opening session.

Max Fisher, of Detroit, chairman of the Jewish Agency’s board of governors, compared the reconstituted Jewish Agency to a “Common Market” of Jewish resources, “an improved instrument for reaching out all over the world.”

The only controversial note at the General Assembly was injected by Mayor Teddy Kollek of Jerusalem who recalled in his remarks that Pincus had scoffed at his warnings in the past that immigration would have its greatest impact on Israel’s large cities. Kollek said that Pincus had “laughed at this and told us the problems would come in the development towns.” But history proved Kollek right, said the Mayor of the city-with the largest new immigrant population. “With all the help of the Jewish Agency and the UJA, the cities are the only ones that can do the major job,” Kollek declared.

Pincus prefaced his opening remarks with a brief rebuttal to Kollek. He said he hoped the Jerusalem Mayor “would concentrate his fund-raising efforts on the UJA and Keren Hayesod so that we could do more for Jerusalem.” Pincus was alluding to Kollek’s personal efforts to raise funds for such institutions as the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Rabbi Mordechai Kirshblum, the associated head of the Jewish Agency Aliya Department, said that Soviet immigrants do not complain as much about housing or employment as about the spiritual barrenness which they often encounter in Israel. The Russian olim “want to see more Zionism here,” he said.

The settlement committee heard from Yehiel Admoni, director of the Settlement Department, that 131 villages hitherto supported financially by the Jewish Agency were on the verge of breaking even and standing on their own feet. Of these were settlements in Galilee and the Jerusalem corridor whose inhabitants are largely of Oriental origin.