Page 88 - ISRAEL'S CRADLE

Mount Scopus was completed, the plan to settle a thousand families through the Labor Settlement Movement is being executed and now the KKL-JNF House is being inaugurated.
Later in the ceremony, the 12 representatives of the first Zionist Congress planted 12 trees at the front of the building, in memory of the first Zionists. The Chief Rabbi, Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook was honored to place the Mezuzah. He opened the main doors wide and declared: "Open the gates that the righteous may enter, who keeps faith."
The large audience entered the building and toured its rooms and halls. They all praised its beauty and expressed the hope that the day on which the KKL-JNF Building would be joined by the Jewish Agency Building (which was established the previous year and superseded the Zionist Executive), the Keren Hayesod Building and the Jewish National Council Building, would come soon.
In the next stage, the Keren Hayesod Wing was erected. At the ceremony for placing the corner stone of this wing on October 17, 1932, during the Sukkot holiday of 5693, various leaders and prominent intellectuals were present, including the poets Hayim Nahman Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky. Others who were present at the ceremony include: Bilu member Menashe Meirovitch, member of the Agency Executive Immanuel Newman, Jewish National Council member Henrietta Szold, Chairwoman of the "Hadassah" Women's Zionist Organization of America Rose Jacobs as well as key activists of Keren Hayesod throughout the Land of Israel.
Leib Yaffe, the Director-General of Keren Hayesod, stated at the beginning of his speech that throughout the years, Keren Hayesod built houses for others and that now it was time for it to "look after itself." He did not conceal his pride that Keren Hayesod, not yet thirteen years old, managed to create a mechanism for collecting a "national tax" as he defined it. Yaffe elaborated upon Keren Hayesod's many enterprises in the Land of Israel, urban and rural, in settlement, in economic life, in education and culture. He concluded his speech with these words:
Only a handful of stones are being set by us today. But all of you here, along with our thousands of employees and agents and our tens of thousands of donors throughout the diaspora, are partners to the placing of this cornerstone. This stone shall serve as a symbol for a new era in our work and as a sign of strength and renewal. From this home, Keren Hayesod shall continue to call for unceasing work, creation and building, one stone after another, until our people's home stands eternally.
Immanuel Newman, the representative of the Jewish Agency, likened the building being erected to a radio station, "from which sparks shall go out daily to the diaspora and reach agents throughout the world, who shall draw strength from them to increase their efforts for the Land of Israel." He hoped that the four institutions – Keren Hayesod, KKL-JNF, the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Council – would walk hand in hand toward completing this fine building in Jerusalem.
A great deal of excitement arose from a telegram of well wishes sent by the 87-year-old Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who marked fifty years of activity in the Land of Israel that year. And so, the
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