Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization of America, closed its 51st annual convention here today by adopting a $9,486,000 budget for its 1965-66 programs in Israel and the United States. The 2,500 delegates also elected Mrs. Mortimer Jacobson to a second one-year term as president.
The budget includes $8,140,000 for the Israel programs, including $3,740,000 for the Hadassah Medical Organization, $2,100,000 for Youth Aliyah, $1,000,000 for the building fund of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem, $700,000 for the Jewish National Fund, and $600,000 for Hadassah’s vocational education program.
In a resolution on the Middle East, the delegates voiced “growing concern” over “the continuing flow of conventional and sophisticated arms from the Soviet Union to Egypt, and the continuing insistence of Egypt’s President Nasser that war with Israel is inevitable.”
The resolution called on the United States Government to take all necessary steps to implement its commitment to “support the territorial integrity and political independence of all countries in the Near East.” This, the resolution declared, “is a decisive factor in creating the conditions necessary for peace in the Near East.”
Hadassah specifically urged the United States, in this resolution, to directly provide arms to Israel to prevent “a military imbalance” between the Arab states and Israel; to impress on the Arab states that “unlawful water diversion projects are and will be considered acts of aggression”; to continue economic aid to Israel; and to encourage the leaders and peoples of the area “to concentrate their efforts and their resources on regional cooperation and peace, and to reject hostility to Israel as a national policy.”
EMIGRATION TO ISRAEL SEEN AS ONE PATH TOWARD JEWISH FULMILLMENT
In another resolution, the delegates noted that the rebirth of Israel offered Jews “in free countries new paths for Jewish self-fulfillment” and that immigration to Israel was “one such path.” The resolution added that, while “not every Zionist will choose this expression of self-fulfillment, Hadassah believes it is an obligation of the American Zionist movement to foster the idea of aliyah, to encourage those who choose aliyah and to help them attain their objective.” The convention called on all Hadassah chapters “to cooperate with official groups charged with facilitating the plans of those who have decided on aliyah to Israel, and to encourage support and understanding of aliyah within their communities.”
Dr. Judah J. Shapiro, executive secretary of the Foundation for Jewish Culture, at today’s closing luncheon, told the delegates that the real challenge to Jewish ness “in our time is for it to learn to speak to America, rather than to the Jews of America, which further implies speaking to the whole Jew not merely to the Jewish part of him.” He asserted that “the motivation for Jewish learning must be shifted from preparation for existence within the Jewish enclave, or against the possibility of Jewish catastrophe, to the conviction that such understanding will make more effective spokesmen for the attainment of social justice and world order to which the contemporary Jewish contribution is potentially powerful.”
HUMPHREY LAUDS ISRAEL’S MEDICAL RESEARCH AS BOON TO WORLD
Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey, told the annual Hadassah dinner session last night that, after seeing the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem, he wanted to see it again, and that he wanted more and more Americans “and other visitors of every faith and nationality, to see it and be inspired by it.”
The Vice-President said that Israel’s medical research “has already enriched the world far beyond what would be predicted by some slide rule formula — by the size of her population, or the modest amount of her natural resources or brief length of her sovereignty.” He also declared that official United States assistance to Israeli research in dollars and in counterpart currency “is probably one of the highest dividend-paying ‘investments’ in history.”
Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who also attended the banquet session, said it was significant and important that Hadassah had honored the Vice-President with its 1965 Henrietta Szold Award for his contributions “to the advancement of medicine.” Another of the dinner’s principal guests of honor was Ambassador Michael S. Comay, Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations, who had addressed the convention earlier in the week. Mr. Comay warned that continuing Arab hostilities leave Israel no choice except that of maintaining “a high level of deterrent strength.” He said the Arabs would attack Israel “only when their leaders think they can win.”
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.
