Celebrations marking the opening of the medical center in Jerusalem were held tonight in approximately 500 communities throughout the country under the sponsorship of Hadassah and the American Jewish Physicians’ Committee. In the larger cities, where both organizations have unites, they joined in sponsoring the fetes, and in smaller communities Hadassah was host to local physicians.
Dinners featured the ceremonies in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, Philadelphia and St. Louis, while in smaller communities open forums and mass meetings were held. In many cities, prominent physicians, Jewish and non-Jewish, participated in the events, professors of Johns Hopkins Medical School, for instance, attending the celebration in Baltimore.
Speaking at the key dinner at the Hotel Astor in New York, before some 2,000 guests and a wider audience linked to the room by an NBC network, Dr. Solomon Goldman, president of the Zionist Organization of America, declared that “no government edict can break the continuity of the Jewish upbuilding.”
Dr. Goldman spoke on a program with Dr. Milton C. Winternitz, former dean of Yale Medical School; Mrs. Moses P. Epstein, president of Hadassah, both of whose addresses were also broadcast; Dr. Walter B. Cannon, of Harvard Medical School; Dr. S.S. Goldwater, New York Commissioner of Hospitals; Dr. Emanuel Libman, Dr. J.J. Golub, Dr. Nathan Ratnoff and Mrs. Felix M. Warburg.
Terming the medical center “a symbol that answers terror with tolerance,” Dr. Goldman asserted that “in concrete form you have unmistakably restated the determination of the Jewish people to rebuild and reclaim their ancient homeland.” Great Britain, he said, “has surrendered to the absurdity and immorality of this game” of world affairs. But, he asserted, “the Jewish claim to Palestine — we ask Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. MacDonald to remember — cannot be annulled by any fluctuation of the political stock market….A British Government of tomorrow, more sensitive to its biblical heritage, more loyal to its traditions that the government of Chamberlain, will be anxious and proud to blot out the shame of today.”
Holding that “no White Paper, no commission report or announcement of Government policy can bend the unbendable will of the Jewish people,” the Zionist leader concluded: “We will not merely cry out against the injustice of the British Government; we will not spend ourselves in futile lamentation, but with the Yishub that stands in the front trenches of the Jewish struggle for existence, we will dare and build, for with the prophets of old and the chalutzim of today, we believe that, until the Mediterranean shall rise and swallow it up, Palestine shall belong to the Jew.”
Dr. Winternitz declared that “a constellation of super-scientists” could be assembled at the medical center from among the refugees and asserted that this “puts the responsibility squarely upon you and me to provide the material resource to bring this about.” He added that “what is Europe’s loss can become Jerusalem’s gain.”
Dr. Cannon, in an attack on dictators’ regimentation of science, asserted that the advancing front of medical science “owes nothing to narrow patriotism or racial pride.” Denouncing “aggressive and unscrupulous dictators” striving to “impose on other nations the practices of the all-powerful state,” he called for resistance to the beginnings of social and governmental change which may be hostile to American rights.
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.
