Zionist Actions Committee Adopts $120,159,000 Budget for 1966-67

The Zionist Actions Committee, policy-making body of the Zionist movement between sessions of the Zionist Congress — adopted an estimated World Zionist Organization budget for 1966-67 early today, setting the figure at $120,159,000. The top body also approved some of the budgetary details which will be worked out finally by the WZO’s finance committee.

Closing the 10-day long session of the Actions Committee with the voting of the budget, the group wound up its deliberations after midnight with a series of resolutions. Among these were one calling on the Big Powers to cease supplying armaments to the nations of the Middle East and requesting that, until such shipments are halted, Israel be given defensive weapons “to deter aggressors in the area and to guard the peace in the region.”

Another resolution concerned the situation of Jews in the Soviet Union. There, it was noted, there had been “a slowdown of anti-Semitic propaganda.” But the committee demanded that the USSR grant full ethnic and religious rights to Soviet Jewry. That measure also “noted with bitterness” the recent effort of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations to equate Zionism with Fascism and racism. On anther issue, the Actions Committee expressed “astonishment” over the light sentences meted out to Nazi war criminals convicted in West German trials.

The Joint Government-Jewish Agency Center for the Diaspora will establish a school to train emissaries to Jewish communities outside Israel, it was announced at the concluding session of the Actions Committee. The emissaries will be given several years of training at the school before being sent abroad. Some academic training will be required for admission to the school which is expected to have 25 students during its first year of operation.