French policy in North Africa is being developed to protect minority groups in that area, including the half-million Jews, who are threatened with grave problems of security, due to the excesses of extreme nationalistic groups, particularly in Tunisia and Morocco, Dr. Maurice Perlzweig, international affairs director of the World Jewish Congress, declared today at a joint meeting of the national executive and administrative committees of the American Jewish Congress.
Dr. Perlzweig stated that the French Government had undertaken to protect Jews and other minority groups in the North African protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco “with exactly the same measures as it was taking to protect French nationals in those areas,” and that the French security authorities in Tunis “had made dispositions to meet any violent attacks that might be contemplated.”
“We must continue to hope,” he stated, “that the leaders of Tunisian nationalism, who have had the friendliest relations with their Jewish fellow-citizens, will continue to restrain the more violent elements in their own ranks, who are not only a source of anxiety to Jews all over the world, but are likely to prove, in the long run, a menace to their own cause.”
Dr. Israel Goldstein, president of the American Jewish Congress, lauded President Truman for stimulating intense and nationwide discussion of the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act. Those who were responsible for the enactment of this “viciously racist and discriminatory” law, he declared, were fully mindful of the law’s intentions, and they “cannot now hope to avoid accountability save by open and public repudiation of their earlier stand.”
“We must take the opportunity which now presents itself to reshape our immigration and naturalization laws so that they better reflect American ideals and experience,” Dr. Goldstein stated. “It is essential that our immigration and naturalization procedures be purged of every taint of racial, religious and ethnic discrimination. Nothing less is worthy of a freedom-loving people.”
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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.
