Teddy Kollek, Mayor of Jerusalem, who also achieved worldwide note as the man who conceived and built the famous Israel Museum, said at a press conference at the offices of the United Jewish Appeal here today that defense — something no other mayor in the world has to contend with — is Jerusalem’s first problem in view of its border location.
He called the integration of its large immigrant population the second gravest problem. The city’s population, now 195,000, has tripled since 1948, one-half the present population being people who have come there since the state was established, plus the children born to them there. Jerusalem, Mr. Kollek said, has an extraordinarily high birth rate — 30 per thousand as against Tel Aviv’s 8 per thousand. It also has the largest percentage of academically trained people and, paradoxically, the largest percentage of illiterates.
Mr. Kollek, who will meet with Mayor Lindsay tomorrow in City Hall, will embark on a speaking tour for the UJA of nearly a dozen large American cities. Discussing the problems of governing the capital of Israel, Mr. Kollek declared that urban renewal is more complicated in Jerusalem than in New York or any other American city because buildings of great antiquity must be preserved while the need for modern housing is constantly on the increase in his city. It is twice as expensive to preserve the facade and atmosphere of a historic building or neighborhood as it would be to raze the whole thing, but he feels that it would be a criminal act to destroy such antiquity.
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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.
