The Palestine Development Council at a meeting yesterday at the Hotel Pennsylvania adopted a resolution providing for the immediate raising of $700,000 to be paid for stock in the Palestine Cooperative Company and applied to credit development in Palestine.
During the discussion of the resolution Rabbi Louis Witt of St. Louis appealed for a larger concentration. so that the drive would net many times more than the amount specified.
Federal Judge Julian W. Mack, president of the Council, who recently returned from Palestine, received an enthusiastic reception from more than 500 men and women at the meeting.
Besides Judge Mack’s address, in which he spoke optimistically of Palestine’s future and described towns and cities through which he travelled, there was a report of the work of the Building Loan and Saving Ass’n of the Council, by Harry Fischel, its Chairman, and a statement of the progress of the economic development of the country, as carried out by Emanuel N. Mohi representative in Palestine of the development organization.
What was accepted by the audience as a reference to Israel Zangwill, whose remarks on Palestine last week created a furore, is included in the following remarks:
“Just as you cannot build up Palestine by resolutions so you cannot thwart that development or even hinder it seriously by paradox or epigram. You can hurt the effort by ill considered phrase or untimely protest, by speaches that, especially in translation with incidental mistranslation, put a new and dangerous and in essence a false interpretation upon our views and our wishes. But there is a curiosity for the future which is far too strong and far too powerful and, I think, far too permanent to be shaken by eloquence or epigram or even by pertinent justifiable critism”.
Judge Mack emphasized the necessity of American Jews understanding the true conditions of Palestine and its actual beauties of climate and potentialities for prosperity.
Representatives from other cities reported to the council on the progress of organization and money raised, among them Leon Miller of Buffalo, Morris Avner of Pittsburgh. Israel Brodie of Baltimore, Nathan Kaplan of Chicago, Sam Waldstein of Boston and Charles Levi of Milwaukee, recently representative of the Council at the Central Conference of American Rabbis.
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