Lessing Rosenwald Urges U.N. to Recommend Independent, Democratic State in Palestine

Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, today declared that his organization favors a United Nations recommendation for the establishment of an independent, democratic state in Palestine in which both the Jews and the Arabs will have equal rights and equal responsibilities as citizens.

Speaking at a press conference, Rosenwald stated that the Council does not recognize the right of the Jewish Agency to speak for anyone but the Jews of Palestine, asserting that the members of his organization recognize as their spokesman the American delegation. He stressed the need for international action to solve the problem of the displaced persons of Europe through the setting up of the International Refugee Organization, adding a vigorous appeal for passage of the Stratton Bill to admit 400,000 DP’s to this country within the next four years.

Rosenwald, recently returned from a three-week visit to Germany as a member of a party of industrialists who went there at the request of the War Department to study the economic rehabilitation of that country, said he visited many of the DP camps in the American zone.

He said he found “a wide divergence of opinion as to the number of DP’s of Jewish faith who desired to emigrate to Palestine.” Asked how many he thought would rather come to the United States than emigrate to the Holy Land, Rosenwald replied that he thought, as a rought estimate, that about 60 percent would come to this country if possible.

While many of them would go to Palestine as a first choice, he said, still that country remains an “unknown quantity” as long as it remains before the U.N. He added that he thought the great desire to emigrate to the Holy Land might be the result of “ignorance,” that the DP’s frequently wanted to go there because they knew of no other country wanting to take them.