Nearly 600 American Jewish community leaders from 80 cities will leave Kennedy Airport tomorrow on a United Jewish Appeal study mission to Israel to study problems of immigrant absorption and welfare arising from the new burdens placed on Israel as a result of the Six-Day War.
The mission, described as the largest in UJA history, is being led by Max M. Fisher, of Detroit, UJA general chairman; Edward Ginsberg, of Cleveland, associate general chairman; and Rabbi Herbert A. Friedman, executive vice-chairman. Participants departing tomorrow will fill three planes. They will join several hundred others who arrived in Israel earlier for the mission, which ends on October 31.
In a pre-departure statement, Mr. Fisher said that the purpose of the mission “is to observe at first hand one of the war’s most serious effects — the dislocation and forced curtailment of Israel’s broad program of social services for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants whom the UJA has helped bring to Israel, and for whose absorption into the social and economic life of that country the UJA shares responsibility.”
Rabbi Friedman pointed out that the enormous cost of Israel’s recent war effort and its aftermath has severely burdened Israel’s taxpayers who will not be able to provide as much of the funds as they previously have done to meet the social costs of absorbing the newcomers. He estimated that there are some 535,000 immigrants in Israel still fully or partially dependent on social aid.
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