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We Were There
Southwestern Jewish Press, December 12, 1946:

By Albert Hutler

"What is being done to prepare Jews in Displaced Persons Camps for Palestine?" This question has been raised at every meeting in which I have told the story of Displaced Persons.

"We who were there" have seen the Jews retrained through vocational training programs of both the Joint Distribution Committee and ORT.

"Devoted to the creation of a new occupational existence for refugees and masses of European Jews" ORT does its work through trade schools, farm colonies and industrial work shops. Jews that I knew, who still had the death like odor of concentration camps, were being reborn at an agricultural experimental farm at Fulds, Germany, near Frankfurt.  We watched 150 of them work, struggle and learn. We saw a Polish poet that we had taken from a concentration camp change overnight into a strong and healthy farmer.  We then followed the poet and his compatriots to Marseille, France and watched the 150 sail away with 2000 more who had been trained at other agricultural stations, to take root in Palestine. We listened to them sing, we watched them cry from joy—we watched a new people as they slowly sailed away.  We had seen a miracle performed, bankers, merchants, lawyers, poets, and writers had learned to love the land and to till it. Here was a cooperative venture of the Joint Distribution Committee and ORT.

Every Jewish Displaced Persons camp has an ORT school supplied with tools and materials where men and women are learning to be skilled artisans; where tradesmen are learning to be cabinet makers, where lawyers are learning to use their hands as well as their minds—all in preparation for work in the new country.

ORT is today rebuilding its schools and workshops so that thousands may be vocationally rehabilitated. It is operating vocational language centers in Switzerland; operating new schools and centers in Lyons, Limoges, Toulouse, Niece, and other French communities.  It is supplying machinery, tools and new materials and farm implements for trade schools, workshops and agricultural projects in Germany and Austria. The influence of ORT is again being felt in Hungary, Rumania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Holland and throughout the world.

ORT depends on us to help continue its work of preparing Jews for a new existence. We contribute to ORT as well as to 30 other organizations, which have been carefully studied and surveyed, through our United Jewish Fund of San Diego. Only through your support can such a worldwide organization as ORT continue its life work.