UJA Mission Group Opens Week-long Study on Jews in West Germany

A delegation of the current United Jewish Appeal mission arrived here today for a week-long study of the German Jewish situation in the first visit by a UJA delegation to West Germany.

Edward Ginsberg, of Cleveland, a national UJA chairman, and Rabbi Herbert A. Friedman, UJA executive vice-chairman, are heading the group which will meet with leading government officials and representatives of Jewish communities in various cities. including West Berlin. The American Jewish leaders met today with Paul Luecke, the Federal Interior Minister, and were guests at a reception given by Asher Ben-Nathan, Israel’s Ambassador to West Germany.

The Jewish leaders will meet tomorrow with Prof. Carlo Schmid, vice-president of the Bundestag, the lower house of the West German Parliament, and will confer later with the mayors of Bonn, Cologne, Hamburg and other cities.

On arrival, Rabbi Friedman issued a statement declaring: “We want to deepen the contacts with the Jewish communities in Germany and to get a good, on-the-spot view of the work and problems in the communities. Our meetings with official personalities here are to give us information on what the Federal Government has done for the building of a democratic state and in which way the younger generation is being instructed about the crimes of the Nazis against the Jews and about the kind of measures taken against former Nazis.”

He added that the “special interest” of the delegation members was “in the development of democracy in the world. Israel too is a member of the democratic family of nations. We hope that the diplomatic relations between Israel and the German Federal Republic will result in productive cooperation, and that the Federal Republic will contribute to making the State of Israel stronger.”