Six Black educators, clergymen and administrators, specialists in the development of low-income rural cooperatives in America’s southern states, arrived in Israel yesterday for a week of intensive study of Israel’s “moshav” system. The tour is being coordinated by the American Jewish Committee’s Christian Visitors to Israel Program, and was arranged in cooperation with the Foreign Ministry of the Israel government.
The group plans to determine ways by which the highly successful “moshav” operations can be duplicated in the Black cooperatives of the Southern U.S. It also hopes to enlist the direct assistance of Israelis with technical experience in “moshav” methods, who would come to the United States to help set up similar systems here.
Leader of the visiting group is Dr. Bryant George of Teaneck, N.J., a distinguished Presbyterian minister, who is also Program Officer in the Department of Social Development of the Ford Foundation, with primary responsibility for social development in the south. While in Israel, the tour members will meet with leaders of the moshav movement and will visit a series of moshav settlements.
Following their week in Israel, the group, which includes the Rev. A.J. McKnight, of Lafayette, La. a Roman Catholic priest who founded the Southern Consumers Cooperative which is the oldest low-income cooperative in the south, will go on to Africa where they will observe various operations of the Ford Foundation. Both Dr. George and Father McKnight have visited Israel previously.
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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.
