Hadassah Convention Opens; Demands Jewish Representation in United Nations

The inclusion of Jewish representatives in any United Nations conferences called to deal with Jewish matters and the immediate shipment of food to feed the starving survivors of the ghettos and concentration camps was demanded here today at the opening session of the twenty-ninth annual convention of Hadassah which is taking place at the Henry Hudson Hotel with 500 delegates from all parts of the country in attendance.

These demands were voiced by Mrs. David de Sola Pool, president of the organization, who also insisted that the White Paper must be annulled and that “lend-lease aid must be given to an enlarged Palestine so that it might speedily absorb millions who could enter and rebuild the country.”

“It does not seem credible that a country like ours, capable of producing such vast and phenomenal programs as lend-lease and relief and rehabilitation on a world-wide scale, should have been unable to help the doomed of the children of Israel,” Mrs. Pool stated in her presidential address. She laid special emphasis on Great Britain’s offer to make available 29,000 certificates of entry into Palestine for Jewish children, 4,500 of them for young people in Bulgaria. She charged that “long delays in the mechanics of transportation, not all of them to be laid at the door of the war emergency, held up the movement of the children until the trap closed upon them with the entrance of the Nazis into Bulgaria,” and warned that “the same bitter tragedy is being repeated in Italy today.”

Dr. Israel Goldstein, addressing the session, characterized the White Paper as a “bomb timed to explode six months hence.” He declared that nothing could stop England from opening wide the gates of Palestine except its own unwillingness, stating further that the United States government, by historic precedent, Congressional endorsement of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate for Palestine, and co-sponsorship of the Atlantic Charter, has a moral and legal right to intervene to make the White Paper impossible. The American sense of justice should dictate that larger considerations of justice be invoked in the solution of the Palestine problem just as they will be in the solution of many another thorny problem of the post-war world, Dr. Goldstein said.

An accusation that “British imperialism,” has never in the course of Britain’s mandatory regime striven for Arab-Jewish reconciliation, but has systematically sabotaged every effort in that direction, was leveled by Pierre Van Paassen, who was one of the speakers. He declared that such an understanding was considered “definitely contrary to the interests of the British Empire as these interests are interpreted by Tory anti-progressive imperialists who still rule the roost in Whitehall.”