The ORT programs in Hungary and Poland are continuing but in Rumania the ORT’s work has been taken over by the government, Dr. Aron Syngalowski, chairman of the executive committee of the World ORT Union, declared at a press conference here today. Dr. Syngalowski is in this country to negotiate with the Joint Distribution Committee for 1950 allocations for the ORT.
Owing to the fact that there was no need for ORT’s work to continue in Czechoslovakia, Dr. Syngalowski declared, the organization’s program in that country was curtailed. He revealed that in Israel there are now close to 1,000 students in ORT installations. The ORT pupils, he added, come from 31 countries and are instructed in a wide variety of vocational courses.
Emphasizing that the majority of Jews now living in Western Europe are of East European origin, the world ORT leader said that the ORT programs in this region are producing skilled industrial workers, many of wham–particularly the youth–plan to immigrate to Israel. Between 1946 and 1949, he disclosed, there were 80,000 ORT students, of whom about one-third were women. European Jewry has experienced a change of attitude towards the concept of labor, he reported, with many Jewish parents now anxious that their children become trained workers.
Eliahu Eliashar, president of the Union of Sephardic Jews in Israel and a member of the Central Board of the World ORT Union, who is also in this country to participate in the ORT-J.D.C. negotiations, reported that ORT training courses in the Jewish state are geared to the needs of the newly-arriving immigrants from Moslem and other countries.
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.
