Preparations were completed today by various Jewish organizations for Rosh Hashanah services which will start tonight in temples and synagogues throughout the country.
Continuing a more than 30-year pattern of religious service to men in military installations, the National Jewish Welfare Board extended its program this year to the new teen-age selectees. Assurances have been received by the organization from the Army, Air Force and Navy that leaves for the holidays will be granted to Jewish men wherever possible.
In addition to arranging for services at some 400 V.A. hospitals and military posts in the United States, the Jewish Welfare Board staff and 150 Jewish chaplains will conduct services in Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Germany, Austria, Alaska and Panama. Home hospitality has been arranged by J.W.B. committees for men unable to go home on leave. Hundreds of synagogues in communities across the nation will be thrown open to the visiting serviceman, after which they will be welcomed in local homes.
AMERICAN JEWISH LEADERS GREET BIRTH OF ISRAEL IN NEW YEAR MESSAGES
The birth of Israel was noted as the greatest Jewish achievement by leaders of all major Jewish organizations in their New Year massages. Judge Joseph M. Proskauer, president of the American Jewish Committee, in his message, hailed “the unanimous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, forbidding enforcement of racially restrictive agreements.” He emphasized that “Jews have witnessed the creation in Palestine of a state based on the humanitarian concepts of constitutional government and republican institutions.”
Describing “the past year as the most hopeful of the past centuries,” Dr. Stephen S. Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, stated that “the state of Israel has come to pass because Jews dared to dream it, to toil and battle for it, to sacrifice that it might come at last into being.”
Dr. Emanuel Neumann, president of the Zionist Organization of America, stated in his Rosh Hashanah message: “I implore my fellow Jews in America to remember that the dire emergency still exists in Israel. Our prayers are lifted for the large remnants of our people who still remain in the displaced persons camps of Europe and fervently await the day of deliverance when they enter the land of Israel.”
Declaring that “at long last the gates of the Jewish National Home are open to mass Jewish immigration,” Dr. Israel Goldstein, treasurer of the Jewish Agency and national chairman of the United Palestine Appeal, called upon the Jews of the United States “to make 5709 the year when Jews in Europe will cease to be displaced persons and when Israel will, upon its ancestral soil, take its place among the nations of the earth.”
Edward M.M. Warburg, chairman of the Joint Distribution Committee, said in a New Year’s message: “The sound of the Shofar is a call for our continued responsibility to our fellow Jews; a new are for the Jews of Europe is heralded by the ram’s herm.”
Former Governor Herbert H. Lehman said in a special New Year’s message that “we have come to a point-in history where the question of whether Jewry throughout the world lives and prospers or declines depends largely upon the vision, the courage, the generosity and the devotion of the Jews of America. In Israel we begin to see the birth not only of a new nation, but of a new dignity, a new freedom for the Jewish people.”
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.
