Proclamation 4740—ORT Centennial Day, 1980

The Organization for Rehabilitation through Training was founded by Jews in Czarist Russia on April 10, 1880, to give technical instruction to Russian Jews and allow them to enter the industrial workforce for the first time in their history. In the course of the following century, the Organization gradually expanded its scope to include vocational training and technical education for unskilled men and women of many races and religions on several continents.

On its 100th Anniversary, ORT is the largest voluntary, nongovernmental job training program in the world. By providing training in over 100 trades?including transportation, education, engineering, mining, agriculture, hygiene, public health, and commerce?ORT has helped more than two million people in their efforts to overcome poverty.

The Organization has been a thread of hope even under the harshest of circumstances. It continued to function in the Warsaw ghetto until the very morning of the 1943 uprising. Among its other proud achievements, ORT can count the rehabilitation of survivors of Nazi persecution in the DP camps of postwar Europe as well as its recent collaboration with the Agency for International Development on programs to modernize Third World countries during the Decade of Development.

Today, as ORT celebrates its centennial, its basic educational network extends to 24 countries and serves 100,000 students in 700 schools. It has helped to lay foundations of individual pride and self-sufficiency all over the world, and the consistent quality of its performance has been an inspiration and an indispensable aid to progress.

Now, Therefore, I, Jimmy Carter, President of the United States of America, call upon all Americans to join me in observing April 10, 1980, as ORT Centennial Day.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-eighth day of March in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fourth.

JIMMY CARTER