Mizrachi Women Open Annual Convention; Appeal to Kennedy on Israel

President Kennedy was urged tonight to take the initiative in resolving “the stalemate of tension in the Middle East” by sponsoring a resolution for direct peace talks between Israel and the Arab states in the current session of the United Nations General Assembly.

The action was taken by delegates representing 50,000 members of the Mizrachi Women’s Organization of America at the keynote session of the group’s 37th annual national convention which opened here in the Hotel New Yorker today.

Earlier in the session, Senator Kenneth B. Keating, who received the women’s religious-Zionist organization’s 1962 “America-Israel Friendship Award,” charged that the United States is adopting a “neutralist” position on Mid-East problems.

The convention, which continues through Wednesday, opened this afternoon with an address by Rabbi Irving Miller, chairman of the American Zionist Council, on the future of Zionism in the United States. “A Zionist cannot be content to be a friend of Israel,” he said, “friends of Israel are now as plentiful as straw berries, and Zionists add nothing to their character by merely adding to their number.”

Mrs. Moses Dyckman, national president of Mizrachi Women, called on the delegates from 36 states and the District of Columbia, to “extend and deepen the influence of the United Nations as a religious responsibility in the fullest and truest sense.”

“Our religious responsibility,” Mrs. Dyckman said, “is to give ourselves to the task of creating peace, of extending and deepening the influence of the United Nations, of building ever more firmly the profound friendship which exists between the United States and Israel, and above all, working day by day, in all the days of our lives, to create those conditions which will allow children, and our children’s children to grow and live in a world of peace and spiritual creativity.”