Soviet anti-Semitism was sharply condemned here today by 600 top Jewish leaders from 125 cities in the United States at the National Inaugural Conference of the United Jewish Appeal. A resolution calling on “free men everywhere” to support Israel for its “courageous attitude in the face of totalitarian pressure” was adopted by the delegates and will be forwarded to President Eisenhower.
Gifts totalling $14,150,000 were presented at the conference at which the nationwide 1953 campaign of the United Jewish Appeal was launched. This sum exceeds by close to $3,000,000 the sums contributed at last year’s UJA campaign launching. More than one-third of the total contributed at today’s session came from donors in New York.
Edward M.M. Warburg, general chairman of the United Jewish Appeal, termed today’s action “a forerunner of what American Jews will do this year in rallying behind the millions of innocent men, women and children in Eastern Europe and in Israel who have become targets of heartless and tyrannical forces.”
The resolution adopted at the parley reaffirms the determination of the United Jewish Appeal to cooperate with Israel in providing a haven of refuge to those Jews who succeed in escaping from the countries of Eastern Europe. “This National Inaugural Conference of the United Jewish Appeal,” the resolution states, “records with pride the dignified stand of the democratic state of Israel in the face of Soviet attacks and vituperation.”
Mr. Warburg, who presided at the final session in the Saxony Hotel here, characterized the Soviet drive against Jews as “an emergency which in many terrible ways resembles the Hitler one.” However, he stressed, “there is a great difference between the Hitler period and the present,” pointing out that “the existence of the State of Israel as a refuge for all Jews in danger must be utilized to the fullest extent.”
Dr. Joseph J. Schwartz, executive vice-chairman of the UJA, declared in another major address that “the Jews of the free world will not abandon Eastern Europe’s 2,500,000 Jews.” He added that “the Hitler period taught us that lives can be saved even in the face of catastrophe, provided we furnish the means for doing so.”
Samuel Daroff, chairman of the UJA’s National Campaign Cabinet, last night told the assembled Jewish leaders that an extraordinary outpouring of philanthropic dollars must take place in the next 90 days to help the United Jewish Appeal meet the “extraordinary challenge posed by the Kremlin’s harassment of Eastern Europe’s Jews and its pronounced hostility to the State of Israel. “American Jews, ” he declared, “will not and cannot fulfill their obligations to the United Jewish Appeal at this crucial time merely by giving the same sums they gave in 1952.”
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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.