Jewish Colonization Association to Support New Projects in Israel, France

The Jewish Colonization Association (ICA) announced here today that a series of projects in Israel and grants to Israeli institutions will account for the largest share of its budget in 1968. But the ICA is also maintaining its traditional support of institutions outside of Israel involved in the resettlement, training and education of needy Jews, the announcement said.

The ICA is a philanthropic society established by Baron Maurice de Hirsch in London in 1891. Its purpose then, as now, was to assist Jews to emigrate from countries where they suffered persecution or economic hardships, to resettle them elsewhere and find them productive employment. It established large Jewish agricultural settlements in Argentina. Activities in Israel have claimed an increasingly larger share of the Association’s budget since that nation was founded nearly twenty years ago, the report said.

The ICA has allocated over 150,000 pounds sterling ($360,000) in 1968 to a housing fund established in Paris to find homes for Jewish families from North Africa. To date, ICA, along with other organizations that it helps, has found homes for more than 12,000 North African Jews, the report said. In addition, it will share with the United Hias Service the cost of transporting Jews to new homelands from Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Arab countries. It will aid the Alliance Israelite Universelle, which maintains a network of Jewish schools in various African and Asian countries, and will contribute to the general budget of the World ORT Union, the organization for rehabilitation through training.

Projects in Israel already in progress or about to be undertaken by ICA in collaboration with the Jewish Agency in 1968 include: the construction of three new settlements in the Biranit region of Western Galilee; the extension and enlargement of agricultural production at Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi, and the consolidation of the agricultural and economic bases of four other settlements which the ICA either founded or aided substantially. In addition, the ICA announced that it will make grants in 1968 to the Hebrew University, the Mikveh Israel – Israel Agricultural School, the Youth Aliyah movement and the Weizmann Institute of Science.