FROM OUR ARCHIVES
65 YEARS AGO
April 22, 1953
Stage 1 of the Jewish Agency’s plans for permanent housing approached completion with the transfer of 20,000 more people from tents to huts over the previous three months. Stage 2 of the plan would move families from canvas and aluminum huts to permanent dwellings, either one-room concrete houses or wooden huts.
For at least one month, Israelis would be without meat rations, as the ship scheduled to bring the meat for the next distribution had not yet left Argentina.
25 YEARS AGO
April 22, 1993
Jerusalem city officials, led by mayor Teddy Kollek, faced off with Arab planners over the controversial issue of housing in Arab areas of the capital. Kollek challenged the Arabs to “start building,” and stop blaming City Hall for their housing problems. The Arabs charged the municipality and the government with discriminating against Arab areas and delaying development in eastern Jerusalem. “There is a tendency for minorities everywhere to blame all their troubles on discrimination,” Kollek said. “Sure, there are one or two city officials who say, ‘This plan was submitted by an Arab. Let’s stick it in a drawer for a while,” he admitted. “But much of the problem is caused by a lack of knowledge of proper procedures,” he said. The planners asked for forms in Arabic, but the officials rejected this, saying many of them, and their superiors as well, who needed to read the forms did not know Arabic. When challenged by the Arab planners on why many zoning plans for Arab neighborhoods left much of the land off limits to development, the city officials acknowledged a problem existed, but said it was due to government policy. It was earlier revealed that for 20 years, the government has imposed a strict quota on new housing starts in Arab neighborhoods to slow population growth.
With leaders of 12 countries planning to attend, the dedication of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum would mark what State Department officials said was the largest gathering of foreign presidents and prime ministers in Washington since the 1963 funeral of president John F. Kennedy. The run-up to the solemn ceremonies already had generated friction with three foreign governments. Israel, angered by what it considered a failure to highlight the link between the Holocaust and the birth of the Jewish state, initially threatened to boycott the ceremonies. President Chaim Herzog agreed to attend, but only after the council offered to let him make brief remarks before the principal speeches by president Bill Clinton and Elie Wiesel. Germany, unhappy that the museum’s depiction of the Nazi-era extermination camps had no mitigating picture of the country’s democratic present, regarded the Holocaust memorial as a slap against a loyal US ally. Both their president and chancellor were conspicuously absent from the week’s proceedings. Austrian president Thomas Klestil, originally scheduled to come, canceled a few days earlier after US officials were unable to meet Klestil’s request for a private audience with Clinton. Klestil decided that the Austrian public – still smarting over the banning of his predecessor, Kurt Waldheim because of his Nazi past, would regard the lack of a Clinton-Klestil meeting as another snub, sources said.