Israel Bond Conclave Reports Record $148 Million Sales in First Eight Months of 1972 Drive

Jewish leaders from the US and Canada meeting here today launched a campaign for economic aid to Israel to provide jobs for Russian immigrants and to promote the country’s development for peace. Addressing the closing session of the Israel Bond National Fall Leadership Conference, Sam Rothberg, general chairman of the Israel Bond Organization told more than 300 delegates that the campaign should produce an additional sale of a minimum of $150 million from September through December which traditionally are the most productive months of the annual bond effort.

Rothberg reported that the proceeds from the 1972 Israel Bond campaign to date amounted to $148 million, the highest figure ever attained during the first eight months of the year in any bond campaign. In 1971. the total sales for the entire year reached $251 million.

The Leadership Conference was addressed last night by Israel’s Minister of Transport Shimon Peres who assailed the Soviet Union’s recent imposition of high exit taxes on educated Russian Jews seeking to emigrate to Israel. He called it “an unprecedented and brutal move that every fair minded person, and certainly the Jewish people, will oppose fiercely.”

Peres expressed confidence “that the American Jewish community will play a major role in encountering this challenge until the gates of Russia are reopened and the soil of Israel is prepared to receive them.” Peres characterized Israel’s relations with the US as “as serious and promising as one could hope for” and stressed that “Israel is an ally which is willing and able to defend its own posture with its own strength.”

Rothberg, who delivered the keynote address last night, urged Jewish leaders in the US and Canada to rally increased bond sales to enable Israel to “fulfill its mission to the Jews of Russia and to all Jews who want to settle in the Jewish homeland.”

In a cabled message to Rothberg and Leo Bernstein, executive vice president of the IBO, Israel’s Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir called for wider economic aid to Israel through bond sales to American and Canadian Jewry. “All of our hopes for the continuation of the cease-fire and progress toward a lasting peace depend on our economic strength no less than on armaments,” Sapir said. Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s envoy to Washington, told the delegates in an address today that the transition from war to peace will be a long, difficult process in the Mideast. He emphasized that the continuation of the two-year-old cease-fire represented the most important single contribution to a real and lasting peace in the area.

Shimon Alexandroni, Israel’s economic minister to the US told the delegates that although Israel has for the first time since the Six-Day War decreased its defense expenditures this year, its defence costs are still running five times higher than they were in 1966, amounting to a third of the total national budget. Julian B. Venezky, national chairman for regions, reported a marked increase in US-Israel trade since 1961 with the US still enjoying a favorable balance. US exports to Israel rose from $142.9 million to $1.2 billion in the past 20 years while Israeli exports to this country increased from $30.3 million to $379 million over the same period, Venezky said. Rabbi Leon Kronish, of Miami, chairman of the National Rabbinic Cabinet of the IBO predicted that the special bond campaign to be conducted by more than 800 synagogues in the US and Canada over the High Holidays would yield $35 million compared to $25 million last year.