Allocations of $1,500,000 to aid programs in Jewish culture and higher education were granted here yesterday by the Board of Trustees of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture at its annual meeting. The allocations went to over 100 scholarly institutions and organizations in 16 countries conducting activities in Jewish education, research and publication and the commemoration and documentation of the Jewish catastrophe in Europe, as well as to the scholarship and fellowship program conducted directly by the Foundation. Dr. Nahum Goldmann, president of the Memorial Foundation and president of the World Jewish Congress focusing on major problems in Jewish education, said that a shortage of rabbis, teachers and other religious and communal functionaries is plaguing Jewish communities the world over as a long-term legacy of Nazi persecution. The aim of the Foundation has been to help relieve those shortages. A spokesman for the MFJC said the Board also paid special attention to the problems of the growing alienation of spirit from the Jewish community, and even from Judaism itself, which is afflicting many Jewish university students and young intellectuals. “The problem is staggering in its complexities and it calls for a variety of possible solutions rather than a reliance on any single one,” the spokesman said.
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