Moshe Rivlin, world chairman of the Jewish National Fund, has arrived in the United States from Israel on a three-week tour to discuss with friends and supporters of the JNF specific projects and programs designed to implement the new five-year plan recently adopted by the JNF. Rivlin, who will visit San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Baltimore and New York, is in the U.S. in response to an invitation given by Rabbi William Berkowitz, president of the JNF, when the two leaders conferred recently in Israel.
The five-year plan Rivlin will be discussing calls for the preparation of the sites for 185 new settlements and the reclamation of 40,000 acres of wasteland for intensive agriculture. During the coming years, 50,000 dunams will be drained and dams will be built to control flood waters and reservoirs will be constructed to conserve large amounts of water. In addition, the JNF will break through 2000 kilometers of new roads and will plant new forests over an area of 150,000 dunams.
During his tour, Rivlin will also review the plans for the construction of the Humbert H. Humphrey Parkway in the American Bicentennial Park. This joint American-Israel tribute to a champion of Israel was announced jointly some days after the Senator’s death last January by Rivlin in Jerusalem and by Berkowitz in the U.S. Rivlin will also discuss current JNF activities in Israel. Upon his return to New York in mid-August, he will participate in a two-day national staff conference of JNF national and regional directors.
At the same time, Berkowitz and Rivlin will also hold discussions dealing with the danger points and crises facing world Jewry, as well as charting new paths JNF will follow in the next decade. “JNF has always been and will continue to be a mass people-to-people movement dedicated to the land of Israel. Yet in the days ahead there is a greater need to broaden the base in the areas of Zionist information and education, and to create personal contact between Jews so as to reclaim and renew the Jewish soul as well as the Jewish soil,” Berkowitz said.
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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.
