Harriet Zimmerman, Active in Jewish Groups and in Aiding Israel. Named Associate Director of Carter’

Mrs. Harriet Morse Zimmerman, who is active in Jewish organizations with nation-wide memberships and in aiding Israel, has been appointed associate director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential campaign to work on national issues of concern to American Jewry, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency was informed today.

Carter campaign headquarters in Atlanta announced that Mrs. Zimmerman, who volunteered to help Carter last week, will serve full time in her position. Mrs. Zimmerman herself told JTA that she will seek to communicate better understanding of Carter within the Jewish community.

“To be ignorant about a major political candidate is a mistake,” she said in a telephone conversation with the JTA bureau here. Noting that Carter has been “quite specific on Jewish issues,” Mrs. Zimmerman said that nevertheless there has been a “gross misconception” in northern areas about Carter, southerners and Southern Baptists in particular. “It’s just a lack of knowledge,” she said.

Mrs. Zimmerman, mother of three children by her first husband, was born in Providence, R.I., the daughter of Annette and Alfred Morse. The family moved to Boston when she was five.

In Boston, as Mrs. Harriet Altschuler, she was full-time coordinator as a volunteer of the Middle East Policy Committee that was set up after the Yom Kippur War. She also was a member of Boston’s Crisis Committee to help Israel at that time. She lived in the Boston area until a year ago when she moved to Atlanta and married Jerome Zimmerman, who is in the lumber business there.

Mrs. Zimmerman, well known in national organizational Jewish life, has been in Israel nine times. She is a graduate of Brookline, Mass, High School and holds Bachelors and Masters degrees from Boston University, where she specialized in Judaica and was a Phi Beta Kappa. She was attending Harvard in a doctoral program on the Old Testament when the Yom Kippur War inspired her to devote full time to aiding Israel.