The Zionist Actions Committee, supreme Zionist body between World Zionist Congresses, today opened its session here to discuss various problems facing the world Zionist movement, including the strengthening the movement in the United States.
The session will be marked by the presentation of a special status in Israel to the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency. The presentation will be made by Premier David Ben Gurion at a meeting of the Actions Committee next week, after the Israel Parliament passes the third and final reading of the bill granting the special status.
The session opened this morning with a formal memorial meeting for Dr.Weizmann at which Mrs. Weizmann and other members of the late President’s family attended. Black candles mounted in a menorah before a black-draped picture of the late President burned low while the members of the Actions Committee stood and heard eulogies of Dr. Weizmann by Joseph Sprinzak, Dr. Nahum Goldmann and Berl Locker. The session was held in the same room in which Dr. Weizmann took his bath of office for his first term.
Dr. Goldmann, analyzing Dr. Weizmann as a Jew, said that he was “perhaps the most perfect synthesis” of the Jews of our time, never doubting the victory of Zionism and that “Israel’s truth would prevail. “Dr. Goldmann added that the late President had worked for “a Jewish State, not a state for Jews.”
Mr. Locker called Dr. Weizmann the “first homogenic Jewish political leader who did not pay attention to anything except Zionism. He was a visionary and a practical man alike, “Mr. Locker continued, “and the final goal– Jewish independence in the homeland–always shone before his eyes.”
A report issued in connection with the session of the Actions Committee reveals that in the past four years Americans and Canadians invested $46,800,000 in new and existing enterprises in Israel. The Jewish Agency’s economic department in New York, headed by Mrs. Rose L. Halprin, has assisted, in the past year alone, in the implementation of American investments in Israel totalling $22,000,000.
The investments stimulated by the American branch of the Jewish Agency include a $1,800,000 grain elevator, now under construction in Haifa; a $1,000,000 brewery and ice plant being erected in Nathanya; a $1,500,000 textile mill now operating in Nahariya; a $150,000 pharmaceutical factory to be built in Haifa; an $800,000 plywood factory near Pardess Hannah; a shoe factory in Jerusalem and two tire factories in Hadera and Petach Tikvah, each capitalized at $3,000,000.
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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.
