After a state visit to Uruguay that started last Wednesday, during which the most extraordinary Government honors were paid to him, Israel’s President Zalman Shazar is leaving tomorrow for Chile, the next stop on his six-week-long Latin American tour. He is due to arrive in Santiago de Chile tomorrow afternoon.
In Chile, as he did in Uruguay, the Israeli chief of state will attend ceremonies at which the two governments will sign an agreement for cooperation in the field of the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes.
Mr. Shazar will have spent almost a week here, during which, in addition to concluding the nuclear pact, he was given a state dinner by Uruguayan President Alberto Heber, addressed a joint session of the Uruguayan Congress, met with the entire Supreme Court of Uruguay, and visited with leaders of the entire Jewish community in this country.
At the dinner tendered in his honor by President Heber, Mr. Shazar voiced a hope for ultimate peace with Israel’s neighboring Arab states. He told the brilliant gathering of 600 leaders of the Government, foremost notables in the country’s intellectual life and leaders of local Jewry that “We have not given up our hope that the day will come when our neighbors will be numbered among our friends.”
The significance of the atomic energy pact for peaceful purposes was spelled out here by Foreign Minister Luis Vidal Zaglio, who signed the agreement on behalf of Uruguay. Said the Foreign Minister: “This agreement is one of the most modern expressions of international law which seeks, through new formulas, to utilize all the conquests of science and technology to help build a better world for all of us.”
Perhaps the most dramatic of the events here during the weekend was President Shazar’s appearance before the joint session of Uruguay’s Congress, with all members of the Assembly and the Senate attending — except for the Communist faction, which boycotted the gathering. Addressing the session, Dr. Martin R. Echegoyen, president of the Assembly, delivered a half-hour greeting during which he lauded Israel and mentioned all of the most prominent leaders of Zionism from Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann to David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir “and all the others who were called “fanatics of social justice and labor agitators, but proved to the world that they were prophets of peaceful civilization.”
A scene charged with emotion took place when President Shazar and his wife, Mrs. Rachel Shazar, received at their temporary residence in the Presidential palace leaders of the Uruguayan Jewish community. Mr. Shazar told Jaime Balter, president of the Montevidean Jewish Community, that he hoped, in the future, to maintain still closer contacts with the Jews in this country. President Shazar and Mrs. Shazar visited Jewish schools, some of them conducted by the Government on a nonsectarian basis, the Jewish home for the Aged here, and other Jewish institutions.
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