U.J.A. National Conference Urges Communities to Defer Drives for Capital Funds

The national conference of the United Jewish Appeal concluded here last night after adopting a resolution urging Jewish communities in the United States that “they endeavor, as an act of self-sacrifice on their part and as a contribution to the mobilization of maximum funds for emergency life-saving needs in the year 1950, to defer campaigns for capital funds.”

The conference also urged that in the event a local community resolves that certain local capital projects are inescapably urgent, then campaigns for such needs should be conducted separately. It also asked that all Jewish communities in the United States, “in fairness to their contributors and to the urgent needs of the United Jewish Appeal,” plan their 1950 fund-raising campaigns on the basis of pre-campaign budgeting. “The participation of the United Jewish Appeal in any campaign shall be preceded by a mutually satisfactory agreement between the community and the U.J.A. on the distribution to the United Jewish Appeal from funds to be raised in the community in 1950,” the resolution said.

Gershon Agron, director-general of the Israel Government’s department of information, told the conference that the present influx into Israel of immigrants from far-flung countries is being rapidly integrated into the Israel community and poses no problem of assimilation. “We have been forced to crowd generations of history into a matter of 18 months since Israel was established,” Mr. Agron said. “This is our destiny, and nothing should be allowed to interfere with it–neither color, nor race, nor any other bar.”

What Israel needs now is “not a melting pot, but a pressure cooker to integrate and assimilate the long-suffering Yemenite, the dour Bulgarian, the sturdy Yugoslav, the seething Moroccan, the meticulous Briton, the determined South African, the impatient American, the haunted Rumanian, the martyred Pole and the rare Russian,” Mr. Agron said in emphasizing the fact that the process of integration must go ahead at full speed.

Community representatives presented at the conference checks totalling $5,900,000 for this year’s drive, bringing to approximately $110,000,000 the sum raised so far in 1949. The Baltimore delegates presented a check for $500,000 as an advance on Baltimore’s 1950 drive on behalf of the U.J.A. The presentation of the check was made by Joseph Meyerhoff, chairman of the Jewish Welfare Fund of Baltimore and represents the first sum to be contributed to next year’s drive.