Pincus Tells New Aliyah Movement That Immigration is Indispensable for Israel

Louis A. Pincus, chairman of the Jewish Agency and head of its aliyah (immigration) department, said yesterday,” Aliyah is the heart of the political and economic future of Israel,” and “the most tangible expression of Jewish unity. Without it we could not remain one people in the long run.” Mr. Pincus delivered the keynote address at the founding conference of the Aliyah Movement of Britain whose members have all pledged to settle in Israel within the next three years. The movement was established in accordance with decisions taken at the 27th World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem last June.

Mr. Pincus said that in Soviet Russia there was a marked tendency among Jews to assert their Jewish origin despite the processes of assimilation that have been operating there for half a century. In the free world, he said, erosion by assimilation was a direct result of the weakness of Jewish education. “It is dismally weak everywhere – the work of the British Zionist Federation being both an exception and an example.” He said the rise in aliyah from the United States and France this year was indicative of Jewish reaction to events in the societies in which they live. He said not many Jews are left in Oriental countries, 750,000 of them now live in Israel, “and they are a great blessing to the country, even if less sophisticated in the technological sense than Western Jews.” Continuation of aliyah is “the aim and purpose of Zionism today,” Mr. Pincus said. “Aliyah is what Zionism is about.” He said cooperation between the Jewish Agency and the Government’s new Absorption Ministry was working smoothly and harmoniously. The means of absorbing immigrants provided by the new agency are increasingly more effective, he said.