Dr. William Haber. President of the American ORT Federation, announced a 1970 budget of $19,173,000, an increase of $1,500,000 and the largest in 90 years of ORT history, at the organization’s National Conference here this weekend. The increase is expected to go largely for education in Israel, France, Iran and India. President Nixon, in a message sent to the Conference, said that “through your rehabilitation and training programs you have lifted hearts and lives. thus restoring dignity and opportunity to the impoverished and to refugees the world over.” Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir sent a message lauding ORT for its work in “preparing the youth of Israel and Jewish youth abroad for the tasks which our people have been called upon to shoulder.”
Eugene Abrams, former official of the U.S. Agency for International Development and now head of the ORT Technical Assistance Department announced the initiation of a refrigeration technicians training school in Santiago, Chile, to be financed by the Swiss government. He said that 12 ORT educational and manpower development projects had been activated in nine countries of Latin America and Africa.
ORT Director-General Max Braude told the conference that there had been a “radical change” in the Jewish occupational spectrum in the last few decades, and that ORT was responding to this by innovating such science-based studies as automation, nuclear technology and computer technology.
Morris B. Abram, President of Brandeis University, told the delegates that the Nixon Administration has aggravated campus turmoil by not following through on its commitment to higher education. “While the turmoil continues to rage within our gates,” he declared, “the trickle of Federal funds to the campus indicates plainly that the promissory rhetoric about aid to the economically deprived is simply not being fulfilled.”
Dr. Samuel Rubert, President of Chicago Men’s ORT was named “Man-of-the-Year.” Alvin Mermin of New Haven and William Wolpert of New York received ORT “Achievement” awards. ORT, Organization for Rehabilitation through Training, operates programs in 24 countries and 87 cities. There are 623 trade and technical education projects with 91 different occupational skills being taught.
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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.
