J.t.a. Directors’ Foundation to Assume Full Ownership of Agency

Agreement on transfer of ownership of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from the Jewish Agency to the membership of the JTA Board of Directors was announced jointly today by the JTA and the Jewish Agency.

Eleazar Lipsky, president of JTA, said the actual transfer of ownership would be made when the legal formalities were completed. He said that the members of the JTA Board had organized the American Jewish News Foundation, Inc., a non-profit membership corporation under the laws of the State of New York, in which ownership of JTA will be vested. The trustees of the Foundation will be the JTA Board members.

He expressed the belief that the new arrangement would provide a wider basis of communal support for JTA and facilitate extension of its services in the community interest. He said that a panel of distinguished personalities in the newspaper field would undertake a survey of JTA operations in 1964 and make recommendations to the Board on their future scope and direction.

Mr. Lipsky said that a satisfactory arrangement had been worked out largely through the sympathetic and understanding attitude of the Jewish Agency which had provided substantial investments in JTA over the past decade and had now generously agreed to forego its claims in order to facilitate the JTA reorganization.

JEWISH AGENCY TO RELINQUISH FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Dr. Emanuel Neumann, chairman of the American Section of the Jewish Agency Executive, declared that the increased support given to JTA by the federations and welfare funds and the indications that this support would continue to grow had finally made it possible for the Jewish Agency to relinquish the responsibility it had borne for more than 10 years.

“The Jewish Agency is proud of the fact that it has been so greatly instrumental in maintaining, during a difficult period, this news service, whose existence is of vital importance to the Jewish people,” Dr. Neumann said. “We are happy that the American Jewish communities, through the federations and welfare funds, have shown mounting interest in JTA and a desire to help JTA to grow and develop so that it may make a maximum contribution to the general welfare.”

Transfer of the JTA ownership will complete a process begun in 1960 when JTA, in agreement with the Jewish Agency and the Large City Budgeting Conference of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, agreed to reorganize JTA on an independent basis, with the American federations and welfare funds assuming responsibilities that would enable the Jewish Agency to reduce and eventually terminate its financial participation.

The LCBC advised the communities in 1961 that “the LCBC regards a Jewish news service of high quality as indispensable and considers JTA as potentially of even greater value than it is today to Jewish communal life.”