War Slows Up Youth Aliyah; Palestine Urged to Admit Balkan Refugees

Only 255 of the 1,570 persons who received Palestine immigration certificates from the Youth Aliyah organization have succeeded in leaving Europe in recent months, the Youth Aliyah disclosed today. Fifty-five of them are still en route to Palestine.

Those who reached the Holy Land included many children orphaned by the sinking of the refugee steamship Salvator off the Turkish coast on Dec. 11. To rescue these children, who were stranded in Turkey, the Youth Aliyah cabled the last certificates available.

Among the youths who have arrived in Palestine there are also many Polish refugees from Lithuania and boys and girls from Rumania and Yugoslavia. Many others are to follow soon.

Meanwhile, Col. Josiah Wedgwood, Laborite M.P., appealed to the Government to open Palestine’s gates to Balkan Jewish refugees, declaring that 600,000 could be saved and brought to the Holy Land to “fight with us for a better and saner world.”

“All we have done is ship some twelve hundred victims of Nazi persecution to Mauritius and only some fifty Bulgarian Jews have been given certificates,” he wrote in The Zionist Review. Demanding drastic revision of the Palestine policy in view of the Balkan tragedy, he said that “American Jewry would not forget the generous gesture in the face of a great enemy.”

Before leaving London for the United States, Dr. Chaim Weizmann issued a message to Anglo-Jewish youth in which he paid tribute to the steadfastness and determination with which they were carrying on Zionist work, arranging mass meetings amid the ruins of air raids and braving every danger.

“I leave for my task in America with a heavy heart, but strengthened by the picture of the Jewish community which has shown, through the grim days and nights of bombing, fire and strength of mind and heart which serve to fortify our hopes for the Jewish future,” Dr. Weizmann said.