250 U.s., Canadian Jewish Leaders to Meet with Rabin, Other Government Leaders on Israel’s Economic

Premier Yitzhak Rabin has invited more than 250 Jewish leaders from the United States and Canada to meet with him and other government leaders on Israel’s economic needs and problems in 1976 during the week of Jan. 12. The Prime Minister’s Israel Bond Conference will plan a program of action to increase the participation of Jewish communities abroad in alleviating the severe pressures on Israel’s economy resulting from a record high defense budget and a staggering balance of payments deficit of more than $3.5 billion, according to Sam Rothberg, general chairman of the Israel Bond Organization.

BRUSSELS CONFERENCE ALSO SLATED

For the first time in the 25-year history of the Israel Bond program, the conference will meet in Europe as well as in Israel. The initial sessions of the 1976 conference will be held in Brussels Jan. 11 and 12 to focus attention on the new opportunities for wider Israel trade with Europe as a result of the agreement Israel signed early in 1975 with the Common Market that will lift all tariff barriers on Israeli goods by the middle of next year.

In Brussels, headquarters of the Common Market, the members of the conference will meet with top officials of the Common Market and with the Ambassador and leaders of the Jewish community of Belgium headed by Paul Philipsson, its president and head of the Israel Bond campaign in that country. Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris, president of the Israel Bond Organization in Europe, will preside at the dinner session Jan. 11 at the Sheraton Hotel in Brussels.

In tribute to the Jews who were killed in the Nazi holocaust in Europe, the visiting Jewish leaders will go directly from the Brussels airport on arrival to Camp Breendonk which served as an SS internment center during World War II. The members of the conference will unveil a memorial tablet in honor of the prisoners who died in that detention camp and the thousands who were deported from there to concentration camps from which they never returned alive.