More than 2,250 Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia have applied to the Joint Distribution Committee for help since the August Warsaw Pact invasion and several hundred have been helped to leave here and settle overseas. A JDC spokesman reported that the JDC was still providing regular welfare aid to 1,400 of the refugees. He also told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the cost of aid to Czech Jewish refugees had already exceeded the $200,000 which was the emergency appropriation made in September.
The Czech situation and other refugee emergencies were reviewed at a conference of American and European Jewish welfare leaders from the JDC, United Jewish Appeal and the European Council of Jewish Community Services. Hias representatives also attended the parley, the first at which American and European Jewish leaders met to jointly assess Jewish welfare needs. The conference was told that the movement of Jews from Czechoslovakia reached its peak in mid-September when more than 100 new applicants reported daily at the JDC offices here. The conference also was told that the Czech situation was only the latest in a series of refugee crises since the end of World War II and that some 220,000 Jewish trans-migrants had passed through Vienna since 1945.
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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.