Hadassah has sent a 20,000-word report on its medical and health activities to Palestine for submission to the Royal Commission, it was announced today, in which the Government is taken to task for not fulfilling its function in protecting public health.
The report declares that much of the Jewish services were initiated because the Government did not adopt or adopted too slowly such public health measures as are normally a government function and that it failed to give subsidies to Jewish health agencies commensurate with the contribution of these agencies to the general welfare.
In addition to surveying health activities developed in the past 23 years at a total cost of $7,500,000, the document is described as “an analysis of the far-reaching gains to the entire population of Palestine — Jewish, Moslem and Christian — which resulted from the establishment of a modern countrywide network of medical institutions and of a comprehensive system of cognate medical activities.”
The report is signed by Mrs. Edward Jacobs, national president, and Mrs. Herman Shulman, secretary of Hadassah. It was sent to the Jewish Agency for Palestine, which is correlating all the evidence presented at the inquiry by Jewish witnesses.
The statement says that Government expenditures for health declined since 1922 and have not since then reached the level of that year “despite the large increase in the number of inhabitants of the country to increased Arab and Jewish immigration and natural increases during this period.” It points out that in 1927 the Zionist medical budget was almost double that of the Government and for a number of years the budget of Hadassah institutions alone exceeded those of the Health Department.
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.
