The New York Times · 25 November 1961

CP-1961-012

Huts and Walls of Mud Isolate Palestine Refugees in Mideast

By DANA ADAMS SCHMIDT

Shown from the top. The whole column — 4.2 times taller than it is wide — is in the enlargement.

Scan 328 × 1376 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

JERICHO, Jordan, Nov. 12—Here in the bleak shadow of the Mount of Temptation, on the arid side of the Jordan Valley, are scattered the mud huts of 8[illegible],000 Palestine refugees. Their hopeless isolation bears out the observation on camp life made a few days ago by Henry K[illegible]rvich, director of the Kalandia vocational training center.

“Once they’re in training, I don’t let my boys go back to the camps,” he declared. “Every time they do, they come back with a morale problem.” “The people have deteriorated in those camps. You’d be surprised—the language, the filth, in every sense the cultivated hopelessness.”

This correspondent has been visiting the camps—in Jordan, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip—and the men and institutions whose task it is to bring hope to the hopeless. When the refugees poured out of the Israeli-held parts of Palestine in 1948 and 1949 most of them settled where they first found security. At first they sought caves or pitched tents.

Then, depending on soil and weather, they built mud huts in traditional style or put together shacks of flattened kerosene tins and oil drums. That is where most of them are today.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan at 5x to 36x by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by OCR and not by a person. DATE UNRESOLVED: the dateline reads 'JERICHO, Jordan, Nov. 12', thirteen days before the label date of 25 November 1961, and the folio that could settle it runs along the top edge but is cut through the middle of the line, leaving only the bottom pixel row - unreadable at 30x. The label date is kept because a dateline is a filing date, not a publication date, but the gap is large enough that either day may be wrong. This is the blurriest scan in its deck block and two passages are marked [illegible] rather than filled in: the second digit of the Jericho refugee count, and four letters in the surname of the Kalandia training-centre director. Highest re-scan priority of the block; a scan taking in a few millimetres above the present top edge would settle the date from the paper.

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