Jewish Agency Executive Continues Meeting with American Zionist Leasers on UJA Crisis

The Jewish Agency executive today continued ##ting in camera with American Zionist leaders on the controversy within the United Jewish Appeal. Agency members were slated to meet with United Palestine Appeal leaders tonight.

Last night, Herman L. Weisman, acting U.P.A. national chairman, issued a battement criticizing Berl Locker, Jewish Agency executive chairman, for calling a U.P.A. heard meeting “without the authorization of any of the U.P.A, officers or of a executive committee.” Weisman termed Locker’s action a “highly irregular and warranted assumption of power,” adding that when ho called for tonight’s session an Agency chairman was aware that a U.P.A. executive committee meeting had been called for next Tuesday.

Weisman revealed that 22 members of the U.P.A board have dispatched a Joint telegram to all board members deploring Locker’s action as “illegal” and urging all members not to attend tonight’s session. Finally, Weisman’s statement calls on “Locker and his associates from Jerusalem” to “desist from their irregular methods to commit U.P.A. to terms designed to give unlimited and arbitrary powers” to Henry Horganthau, Jr., and Henry Montor.

Meanwhile, Harold J. Goldenberg, chairman of the national Council of the U.P.A., released a statement on behalf of himself and 15 other members of the U.P.A. card warning that a “handful of men guided by the dogma of ‘rule or ruin’ are seeing to sabotage the destiny of the Jewish people.” The statement attacked the president leadership of the U.P.A. as having sunk to the “lowest depths of moral bankruptcy in the attempt to prevent a meeting of the hoard, which the statement called the only legally entitled body to decide the affairs of the United Palestine Appeal.”

In an attack on Drs. Abba Hillel Silver and Emanuel Neumann, the statement said they have “flouted the will of the overwhelming majority and in a fit of pique resigned from the Jewish Agency executive.” Drs. Silver and Neumann were also accused of having attempted to stop tonight’s meeting, while Weisman was charged with fielding the post of acting chairman of the U.P.A. “without legal warrant or authority and without the approval of the board of directors.”