United Hias Service staff in Vienna and other cities of Europe is continuing to process Jewish emigrants from Eastern European countries who wish to be resettled in Western Hemisphere countries, James P. Rice, executive director of the world-wide Jewish migration body, said today.
Mr. Rice, who returned from Europe yesterday, reported to Carlos. L. Israels, United Hias president, that there was a small group of migrants who, for various reasons, especially family reunion, wanted to emigrate to countries other than those originally projected for them. United Hias, he said, was seeking visas for these people. United Hias is a beneficiary of the United Jewish Appeal.
Mr. Rice conferred in Europe with governmental and inter-governmental officials, including Marcus Daly, Director of the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, and U.S. consular officials, before whom he presented the problem of visas to Jewish refugees from Egypt.
He said that he received “sympathetic response, from some officials,” to his expressed hope that there “will be some extension of the 1957 law, perhaps as part of the U. S participation in the World Refugee Year which is scheduled to begin in July in accordance with United Nations planning.”
In the past four years, United Hias has resettled close to 35,000 Jews in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Australia, and elsewhere. Of these, more than 14,000 were Jewish men, women and children who managed to leave Hungary following the revolt of 1956. An additional 800 to 1,000 Hungarian Jews who remain in Western Europe, according to Mr. Rice, will be resettled this year, mostly in the United States under a provision of the 1957 U.S. refugee legislation.
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.
