United Jewish Appeal Gets $16,870,000 at Dinner Honoring Sen. Lehman

Contributions totalling $11,037,000 for the regular 1956 campaign of the United Jewish Appeal and $5,833,000 for its emergency Special Fund were made here last night in tribute to Senator Herbert H. Lehman who was honored by the UJA at a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for his leadership in humanitarian causes. More than 1,000 Jewish communal leaders from all parts of the United States attended the affair.

The United Jewish Appeal drive for 1956 is not scheduled to open formally until the end of February, it was announced at the dinner by William Rosenwald, UJA general chairman. The advance contributions made last night indicated more than a 50 percent increase over pre-campaign giving at this time a year ago. The gifts to the UJA’s Special Fund were made by each donor “over and above” his contribution to the regular campaign.

A new immigrant village carrying Sen. Lehman’s name will be established in Israel, it was announced at the dinner. It will be located in the Ashkelon district and will be populated by immigrant families now arriving from North Africa. A scroll to this effect, lettered in English and Hebrew, was presented to Sen. Lehman by Edward M. M. Warburg, president of the UJA. The document was signed for the UJA by Mr. Rosenwald, Mr. Warburg and Rabbi Herbert A. Friedman, the Appeal’s executive vice-chairman; and by Dr. Nahum Goldmann and Berl Locker, chairman of the Jewish Agency.

LEHMAN SCORES U.S. MIDDLE EAST POLICY, URGES ARMS FOR ISRAEL

Sen. Lehman, in his address at the dinner, scored American policy in the Middle East. He described as “folly” the United States policy of “impartiality” as between the Arab States and Israel, and the policy of seeking “to draw one and then the other of the Arab States into our complex pattern of world politics, as in the Baghdad Pact. “We have reaped from some of the Arab nations, for all our so-called impartiality, a harvest of hostility and anti-Western agitation,” he declared. “And we set the stage for the direct entry of the Soviet Union into the very center of the scene. We have made it doubly easy for the Communists, and doubly hard for ourselves.”

American policy, he stressed has served “to give the Israelis a shattering sense of isolation, a feeling of having been abandoned and left to shift for themselves, though surrounded by deadly enemies bent on their destruction.” Instead of basing “our policy on the bed rock facts of the Middle East today, the grinding poverty, unrest and instability at the Arab States, and the dynamism democracy and stability of Israel,” Sen. Lehman, declared, this country’s policy is one of “pious phrases about peace, meaningless sentiments about impartiality, and mechanical calculations of naive military strategy.”

Senator Lehman warned that the United States must not let the Arab States “fall prey to Communist-type revolutions or to Communist intrigue” and stressed that “we must concentrate with all our might on helping them to resolve their basic problems.” At the same time, he declared, “Israel must be assured of security and territorial integrity. Her fears of aggression must be quieted, and the sabre rattling that now resounds through the area, on both sides, must be stilled.”

He listed the following three point plan which he offered as America’s “answer to Soviet intrusion” in the Middle East. 1. A security pact with Israel, but open to all her neighbors; 2. Arms for Israel, as long as arms are needed to maintain the present precarious balance of forces; 3. Large-scale and long-range economic aid to the Arab states and to Israel. In the meantime, he called for strong support of both the United Jewish Appeal and State of Israel Bonds in behalf of “embattled and endangered” Israel and Jews in other parts of the world.

EBAN WARNS SUMMER MAY BRING ARAB WAR AGAINST ISRAEL

Israel Ambassador Abba S. Eban told the UJA leaders that Arab truculence against Israel, bolstered by “the uncritical support of the Soviet Union” and aggravated by both Soviet and British arms shipments to Egypt, have placed Israel in imminent danger of attack and aggression which may come “by the summer of this year.” Added to this danger, he emphasized, is the fact that there are no “effective guarantees capable of deterring an aggressor or re-assuring his prospective victim.”

Mr. Eban called, first, as a matter of “paramount urgency,” for a strengthening of Israel’s defenses,” especially in the air, terming this a “basic military deterrent” which could “preclude a conflict in the summer of this year.” Secondly, he urged the western world “to dispel the danger of conflict and to relieve mutual fears by proclaiming in solemn, public, compelling contractual terms its determination to help resist any change of the existing frontier by force.” Lastly, he called for a “sincere advocacy and pursuit of a peace settlement” but stressed that “such a settlement will surely not be obtained by inviting little Israel to become still smaller in order that the ‘vast Arab’ Empire should further expand.”

Mr. Rosenwald termed the more than $16,800,000 in gifts “a resounding tribute to Senator Lehman’s nearly half a century of humanitarian leadership and service, and a vigorous endorsement of the United Jewish Appeal’s intensified effort to help sustain democratic Israel through programs of refugee settlement and agricultural development.