A six-week nationwide emergency drive for the collection of $39, 500, 000 in cash was set in motion here today by the national executive committee of the United Jewish Appeal following a report by one of its key members that “rescue and relief requirements in Europe and North Africa, and immigrant resettlement needs in Israel are outrunning the availability of funds.”
The $39, 500, 000 cash was explained by Israel D. Fink of Minneapolis, National Cash Chairman of the UJA, and Rabbi Herbert A. Friedman of New York, the UJA’s executive vice-chairman. Mr. Fink, who returned last week from a two-week series of consultations and a personal survey in Europe and Israel, told the executive committee that “the reduction in the dollars available is threatening an immediate slowdown and possible cessation of aid programs involving vast numbers of the 575, 000 needy, distressed and refugee Jews now on our rolls in Israel, France, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Iran and other countries.”
He reported “an especially difficult situation in Israel” which he said was resulting from an extended period of high immigration, and of the giant needs in absorption, housing, water and social services which this record immigration is producing. “The Jews coming into Israel cannot be turned back,” he declared. “But in effect we are turning them down to the extent that we fail to meet their elementary needs for housing, medical help, education, job training and employment.”
Mr. Fink’s report also singled out France as “a center of acute and worsening Jewish need.” He emphasized that “5, 000 families made up of close to 20, 000 men, women and children who entered metropolitan France last spring and summer as refugees from Algeria and who have been subsisting on French Government aid supplemented by the French and American Jewish communities face the prospect of losing government assistance beginning July 1. On that day they will turn to the Joint Distribution Committee and French Jewish bodies, and these overburdened organizations simply haven’t got the funds!”
Mr. Fink stressed that French Government aid to the Algerian refugees was legislated for “one year,” and added: “The year is now running out for Jews and non-Jews alike, and what makes the situation particularly urgent is that we don’t have the financial resources in hand to cope with the relief needs that will begin multiplying astronomically just two short mouths from now.”
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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.
