Sephardi Jewish Leaders Claim Climate in Israel for Immigration is ‘worse Than Ever’ and Term Projec

Sephardi Jewish leaders from several countries expressed profound disappointment with Premier Menachem Begin’s Likud government. They said that the climate in Israel for immigration was “worse than ever” and that Project Renewal, Begin’s emergency plan for improving the lot of 100,000 of Israel’s poorest citizens, had been “a total fiasco.’

The criticism of the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency came at the end of a meeting yesterday of the World Sephardi Federation’s aliyah and social commission, which was attended by Nissim Gaon, the Federation’s president, who had originally proposed Project Renewal to Begin shortly after the 1977 Israeli general elections.

Summing up the two-day conference, Roger Pinto, the commission’s chairman, spoke of a “total lack of coordination” between the Ministry of Housing and Absorption and the Jewish Agency and said this was frustrating would-be immigrants to Israel.

ALIYA DIFFICULTIES SPELLED OUT

Pinto, a French businessman and leader of the French “Ziona” movement, spelled out the difficulties faced by the World Sephardi Federation in promoting aliya to Tiberias and Kiryat Shemona in answer to the government’s plea for more Jewish settlers in Galilee.

On the one hand, he said, Jewish Agency officials had told the Federation that there was no scope for immigration in Tiberias because of local unemployment, On the other hand, the European head of the Jewish Agency’s aliyah department had said it had 20 vacant apartments there and was calling for families to occupy them.

Pinto added that the Federation would therefore press on with its own program to encourage a further 40 families to settle in Tiberias in addition to the 60 Sephardi families who had settled there in the past two years. If there was not enough work for them, it would find the necessary investment to create new jobs there.

A similar situation had arisen in Kiryat Shemona where the Federation had decided to send out 15 young volunteers to the town despite the claim of the Jewish Agency office in Paris that it had received no instructions from Israel concerning these volunteers, Pinto said.

The charge that Project Renewal had been “a total fiasco” came from another French member of the commission, Jacques Abu-Hatzeira, who said that although the Sephardi Federation had had “big hopes” when Begin came to power, “almost nothing” had been done.

The project, entailing provision of 45,000 apartments over a five-year period for badly housed Israelis, was “still only at the start of the road,” even though the Begin government was nearing the end of its term of office, Abu-Hatzeira said. He and Pinto emphasized that they were equally critical of previous Labor-led governments and were not interferring in Israeli domestic politics.