“After visiting the Jerusalem Forest with its hundreds of thousands of trees ringing Israel’s capital, I am more than ever convinced of the effectiveness of the afforestation policy of the Jewish National Fund, which already resulted in the planting of 26,000,000 trees in the last ten years,” Dr. Harris J. Levine, president of the JNF of America, reported today following his return from Israel. He urged American Jews to help in the further implementation of this policy, adding that another million trees around Jerusalem would go a long way to make the city impregnable to attack.
Referring to the effort now being made by the JNF of America to have every Jew in the United States plant ten trees in honor of the ten years of Israel’s independence, Dr. Levine declared that he couldn’t think of a better gift. American Jewry might present to the Jewish State at the present moment than a million new trees, which he characterized as “a million new guardians on the borders of Israel.”
“The Jewish National Fund is an institution for the peaceful development of the soil of Israel,” hesitated, “but it stands to reason that in the planning of its land development activities the JNF is largely governed by the consideration of strategy looking to the defense of the country.”
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.
