A serious lag in the construction of housing units for immigrants was denounced today by Jewish Agency. Executive chairman Pinhas Sapir. He urged the Housing Ministry to take urgent steps to close the gap between immigrant housing requirements and the number of available flats.
Sapir made the demand at a meeting of the Immigration and Absorption Authority, a joint government-Jewish Agency body. He and Absorption Minister Shlomo Rosen were informed by Housing Ministry representatives that only 7000 housing units were completed last year out of 11,361 that had been promised for immigrants. They said that Housing Minister Avraham Ofer has warned contractors that they would no longer be employed by the Ministry if they continued to fall to meet their building time-tables.
The government, meanwhile, has acted on demands by the Absorption Ministry and Jewish Agency to free new immigrants from the requirement to identify their tax-exempt cars by placing the license plates in a special white frame. The measure was originally enacted to enable police to identify such vehicles easily because many newcomers were abusing the privilege by selling their tax-free cars to non-immigrants.
The Jewish Agency, contended, however, that the special plate frames aroused jealousy among Israelis not entitled to the tax exemption and created a hostile attitude toward immigrants. The Agency said police could expose abuses if they paid more attention to their routine license checks.
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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.
