Dr. Nahum Goldmann, chairman of the Jewish Agency today urged a United Jewish Appeal study mission of 115 American Jewish leaders to call on American Jewry for aid to Israel not in terms of any immediate emergency but in terms of planning a long-range program. Such a program, he said, must seek to bring about a final solution of the great unsolved problems facing the people of Israel.
He emphasized that this goal was vital because Israel must be consolidated before it faced two other emergencies. One emergency, he said, would come before the achievement of normalization of the Arab-Israel situation. The other, he stated, would be a major immigration from Eastern Europe. Declaring he was speaking on a basis of “more than guessing,” he said: “In the not too distant future we will witness a mass immigration from the Eastern European countries, notably from Russia.”
Dr. Dov Joseph, treasurer of the Jewish Agency, told the United Jewish Appeal delegation that “$400,000,000 is still required to complete the absorption of the nearly one million immigrants who arrived in Israel since the state was established.” He proposed a five-year plan for a special fund campaign to solve unmet problems.
Morris W. Berinstein, general chairman of the UJA, noting that this year had been proclaimed World Refugee Year, commented that “we can say without irony that every year since the beginning of the Hitler era has been a world refugee year for the Jews.” He pointed out that the immigrant’s difficulties do not end with his arrival at the port of haven but involved all the problems of resettlement. He said the United Jewish Appeal must concentrate on speeding up the resettlement of the immigrants in Israel.
The UJA delegation visited the Old Age Home in Natanya named for Freda Schiff Warburg, mother of Edward M.M. Warburg, chairman of the Joint Distribution Committee. At a brief ceremony celebrating the tenth anniversary of the operations in Israel of Malben–the JDC agency for the aid of the aged, ill and handicapped–Mr. Warburg said that Malben’s chief pride was that it had helped many thousands of such handicapped immigrants to become useful and self-supporting citizens. More than 150,000 immigrants had been aided by Malben in Israel’s first decade at a cost of $95,000,000.
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