The chairman of the French section of the World Jewish Congress, Senator Michel Dreyfus-Schmidt, has been named by France to its delegation at the United Nations General Assembly session currently meeting in New York.
A close associate of President Francois Mitterrand, Dreyfus-Schmidt has represented Belfort in the Senate since 1980. Previously he served as an elected Deputy in the National Assembly. He was elected chairman of the WJC-French section in 1981, representing the largest Jewish community in Western Europe numbering some 700,000 members.
Dreyfus-Schmidt, who will arrive at the United Nations at the beginning of November, was last month named by the new French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius as Extraordinary Representative to the Ministry of European Affairs with responsibility for the Council of Europe.
According to the WJC Paris office, Dreyfus-Schmidt, held a private meeting two weeks ago in Strasbourg with UNESCO president Amadou Mahtiar M’Bow in which a number of issues of Jewish concern were raised. Specifically, the Paris office reported, the discussions included a follow-up to a written question earlier by Dreyfus-Schmidt to M’Bow concerning continued UNESCO condemnation of Israeli archaeological digs in Jerusalem despite the report of UNESCO’s own investigator of the propriety of these digs. M’Bow and, Dreyfus-Schmidt are scheduled to have further talks on this subject.
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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.
