Mr. D’avigdor Goldsmid Retiring from Board of Deputies: Not Standing for Re-election in May Says Mr.

I would like to say how much the Community is indebted to Mr. O. E. d’Avigdor Goldsmid, who, I am told, does not intend to stand again as President of the Board of Deputies (the elections take place in a few weeks). We shall all feel regret at his departure, Mr. Leonard G. Montefiore, President of the Anglo-Jewish Association, who is co-President with Mr. Goldsmid of the Joint Foreign Committee, said at the meeting of the Anglo-Jewish Association held this morning, in recommending the renewal (agreed to by the meeting) for three years, as from next May, of the agreement with the Board of Deputies regarding joint action in foreign affairs (through the Joint Foreign Committee).

The year 1931 is the 60th. anniversary of the foundation of the Association, Mr. Montefiore announced, and it did cross my mind, he said, whether we should copy the United Synagogue and have a celebration. But I thought that on the whole sixty years is so juvenile that we might postpone it for 10 years.

The report in itself does not differ very substantically from former ones, he said. It is Mr. Duparc’s 42nd. annual report, and the first from the pen of Mr. Rich. For any people who feel despondent about the position of Jews all over Europe, Mr. Monteficre went on, I think it would be good if they read past reports. If one looks back, one becomes very conscious that although there are dark spots, yet there are very bright ones. Lucien Wolf used to refer to certain of the reports as “catalogues of woe”, and when we think that a war has intervened and there has been what has been called an “economic blizzard”, I don’t think we need be despondent.

In recommending that £1,368.10s.6d. be voted to the Jerusalem School of the Association, the Evelina de Rothschild School, for the second quarter of 1931, to which the meeting agreed, Mr. Montefiore announced that the High Commissioner hoped to move out of Frutiger House next week, and as soon as certain improvements were effected, he said, the school would move back. It was hoped that after all improvements were made the school would be a model school, perhaps the finest in Palestine, and certainly comparable to any school in this country.