Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt and French Ambassador Count Rene de Saint-Quentin, Guests of honor last night at a sponsors’ dinner for the Leon Blum colony in Palestine, stressed, respectively, the sympathy of the United States and France toward refugees. The dinner at the Hotel Astor was attended by about 1,500 persons.
Mrs. Roosevelt said that “it is in the American tradition” to help the oppressed. Count de Saint-Quentin asserted that “France was ever open to refugees and owes much to their intellectual as well as to their material contribution.” Regarding the present refugee problem, he declared that “the Government and the French nation will prove that they do not remain deaf to the plea that the great American Republic, through the noble appeal of its President, addressed to all nations of good-will.”
William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor and head of the sponsors’ committee, was presented with a Jewish National Fund Golden Book certificate. M. Blum spoke by radio from Paris and Lady Reading, in place of Dr. Chaim Weizmann, and Leopold S. Amery, from London. Other speakers were Mayor LaGuaria, Dr. Israel Goldstein, Abraham Cahan, Max Zaritsky and Dr. Nahum Goldmann.
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