The Jewish Agency today made public a report prepared for the forthcoming World Zionist Congress on its expenditures and activities for the period since the and of World War II which reveals a striking increase in income and immigration as compared with the period from the organization of the Agency, in 1929, until the outbreak of the second world War.
The report, which highlights Israel’s rise as a center of gravity of Jewish interest, especially as s, solution of the problem, of Jewish homelessness, in the most crucial period in Jewish history, reveals that in the four-and-a-half year period from the and of the war until March of this year, the Agency spent 129,596,814 pounds as compared to 4,475,000 pounds which it expended during the first ten years of the Agency’s existence. During the war years, the Agency’s expenditures totalled 17,827,146 pounds, according to the report.
The bulk of the Agency’s income during the postwar period, the report points out, came from the United States. However, the Agency’s income during the most hectic period in its history could not keep up with its needs and the Agency had to rely to an increasing extent, upon loans. Its income during the four-and-a-half year period ending this March was 94,764,656 pounds, with 60 percent of this sum coming from the Keren Hayesod, Jewish Nationals Fund, special Youth Aliyah campaigns and emergency drives in behalf of Israel’s war effort.
The statistics on immigration revealed in the report are more striking than the rise in income. In the 30-year period the and of World War I, when Britain took over the administration of Palestine, until 1948, when the state of Israel was established, a total of 480,000 Jews settled in Palestine. In the three-year period from the proclamation of the Jewish, state until June 1951, 638,597 men, women and children arrived in Israel. The Agency organized and transported 95 percent of the immigrants who entered Israel in the latter period.
About one-quarter of all the arrivals in tie three-year period came from Oriental and Middle East countries, with 45 percent coming from Europe and small numbers from the U.S., South America, Britain and South Africa, From Iraq case 107,000 immigrants, from, Yemen 48,000, from Morocco, Tunis and Algiers 39,000, from Libya 35,000, from Turkey 33,000 and from Iran 18,000. Among the European immigrants were: 105,000 from Rumania; 103,000 from Poland; 36,000 from Bulgaria; 18,000 from Czechoslovakia; 14,000 from Hungary; and 7,000 from Yugoslavia.
A breakdown of the Agency’s expenditures in the post-war period discloses that 49.1 percent was spent on immigration and absorption (with the Agency helping 90 percent of all who passed through immigrant camps in this period); 25 percent on the establishment of agricultural settlements; 28.3 percent for defense and political affairs; and seven percent for other activities.
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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.
