Jewish Life Reviewed in Latest Cables and Letters

A memorial gathering was held by the executive of the Zionist Organization and of the Jewish Agency in honor of their late colleague, Dr. Victor Jacobson, and of Oscar Wassermann, formerly chairman of the administrative committee, at the Zionist Central Office today.

Professor S. Brodetsky said that the Jewish year 5694 had taken heavy toll among the leaders in the cause of the Jewish National Home, for they had had to mourn the loss first of Motzkin and Bialik and then of Victor Jacobson and Oscar Wassermann. The latter two had been brought up in assimilated surroundings, the one in Russia and the other in Bavaria but they had both come back to their people and worked with unsparing energy for the furtherance of their national cause.

Jacobson had served the Zionist movement for a very long period in various capacities—in Beyrout, Constantinople, Berlin and Copenhagen—but he would best be known for the valuable work that he had done as their diplomatic representative in Paris, and particularly as banking expert, and his treatment under the new regime was symbolical of the tragedy that had befallen the Jews in that country. His loss was all the more serious in view of the fact that the other powerful non-Zionist sponsors of the enlarged Jewish Agency had passed away.

Sir Ormond d’Avigdor Goldsmid paid a warm tribute to Herr Wassermann, with whom he had worked in the closest cooperation in the interests of the Jewish Agency. He recalled the fact that Herr Wassermann had been a member of the Joint Palestine Survey Commission, which had prepared the way for the extension of the Agency and that he had rendered very useful service at a critical period both as chairman of the administrative committee and as chairman of the finance and budget commission. Wassermann had never spared himself in their cause and he would be sorely missed, he declared.

Dr. M. Rosenblueth said that it had been his privilege to work together both with Dr. Jacobson and Herr Wassermann and thus had the opportunity of learning to understand their character and their value to the cause of Jewish Palestine. He had worked under Dr. Jacobson from 1914 to 1919, when in consequence of the war, the Central office of the Zionist Organization was located in Copenhagen, and he had worked under Herr Wassermann as chairman of the Keren Hayesod in Germany from 1928 to 1933. Both men had displayed a singular devotion to the Jewish national cause, which had been in no way affected by their indifferent health.