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Regarding immigration from those countries where there is opportunity for selection, the government of Israel and the Jewish Agency agree to reduce the proportion of old, sick, and invalid individuals and others requiring social care and to increase the proportion of healthy immigrants of working age, young people, and children. The agreement does not apply to Eastern European countries and where immigration is a matter of rescue.

Giora Josephtal, treasurer of the Jewish Agency, is co-chairman of the Israeli delegation that negotiates the reparations agreement with West Germany, and subsequently serves as chairman of the board of the Reparations Corporation.

January 16: Operation Cyrus, the airlift of Jews from Iran, begins.

January 29: The last convoy of new immigrants from Libya arrives in Israel following an aliyah of over 30,000 Jews in the two preceding years. Thousands of isolated Jews remain in Libya, but following rioting against them many will emigrate.

July 13: Eliezer Kaplan, Mapai leader, first Israeli finance minister and treasurer of the Jewish Agency since 1933, dies aged 62.

November 24: The Knesset passes a law establishing the status of the Zionist Organization and defining the relationship with the State of Israel: The World Zionist Organization - Jewish Agency (Status) Law.

November 30: The first immigrant families settle in Migdal HaEmek.

December 25: The town of Hatzor is founded in the Galilee, developing from the Ma'abarah located there. The immigrants come from the camp in Rosh Pinah. Living conditions are poor.

Immigration drops drastically in 1952, for the first time in years, totaling 24,000 as compared to 175,000, the previous year.

Among the settlements founded in 1952 is Orot in the south. The members came from the United States. Also the pioneer outpost Sde Boker is founded in this year.

Chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive: Berl Locker.

Chairman of the Executive of the World Zionist Organization - Jewish Agency, American Section: Nahum Goldmann .

Treasurer of the Jewish Agency: Giora Josephtal.

Chairman Youth Aliyah Department: Moshe Kol.

Chairman Settlement Department: Levi Eshkol.

Chairman of the Immigration Department: Shlomo Zalman Shragai.

Chairman Absorption Department: Giora Josephtal.

January 7: The Herut movement organizes a mass demonstration near the Knesset in protest against the notion of accepting reparations from Germany. The crowd throws stones, breaking windows in the Knesset. The police respond with tear gas.

January 9 : Prime Minister David Ben Gurion wins approval of the Knesset to submit a collective claim to the West German government for 1 billion dollar in reparations for the expense of absorbing 500,000 refugees. The Claims Conference asks for 500 million Dollar for victims living outside Israel. Ben Gurion overcomes the opposition by proclaiming: "Let not the murderers of our people be also their heir."

January 15: Menachem Begin, leader of the Herut party, is suspended from the Knesset for three months for threatening violence in the house.

January 26: UN General Assembly Resolution 512 and 513.

February: President Harry S. Truman instructs the director of the Bureau of the Budget to increase economic aid to Israel for the fiscal year 1953 from 25 million to 80 million Dollar.

March 20: Negotiations with representatives of West Germany start in Holland.

April 1: The Knesset passes the Nationality Law.

May 4 : Israel announces it will move its Foreign Office to Jerusalem. The U. S. and other Western powers oppose the move. Israel defers action.

June 5: A cornerstone ceremony is held at Ein Kerem, Jerusalem, for the new Hadassah - Hebrew University Medical Center, which will replace the closed hospital in the Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus.

June 9: New currency notes are issued bearing the imprint Bank Leumi of Israel.

June 13: The Israeli Atomic Energy Commission is established.

June 25: Finance minister Eliezer Kaplan resigns for reasons of health and is named deputy Prime Minister. He is replaced by Minister of Agriculture Levi Eshkol.

July 14: Arab infiltrators murder five Israeli guards in Timna.

July 19 - August 3: Israel participates in the Olympics for the first time, represented in Helsinki by 26 athletes. One of them is sprinter David Tabak.

August 6: The first choir festival takes place in Jerusalem.

August 18 : In a Knesset speech, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion extends "the hand of friendship" to the new Egyptian regime and privately offers economic and political assistance, which Egypt responds favorably. Private conversations will continue until December 1954. He warns Syria against threatening Israel. On 15 August Syrian ruler Adib Shishakli threatens to attack Israel.
Pinhas Lavon joins the government as minister without portfolio.

August 21: Yitzhak Sadeh dies aged 62.

August, 26: The Knesset passes the Entry into Israel Law.

September 11: Israel and West Germany sign a reparations agreement in Luxembourg, which states that (1) Germany will send Israel, over 14 years, 715 million Dollar in goods; (2) Germany agrees to enact legislation to provide individual restitution to victims of Nazi persecution; (3) Germany will pay the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany 107 million Dollar, through Israel, for the rehabilitation of Nazi victims living outside Israel.

September 19: Another government crisis develops over a religious issue, the conscription of women in the army.

September 23: Minister of Social Welfare Rabbi Yitzhak Meir Levin, leader of Agudat Israel, resigns. Agudat Israel and Poalei Agudat withdraw from the government, which is left with only 60 supporting Knesset members.

October 9: Syrian-Israeli talks on the division of the demarcation zone start. They will continue until 27 May 1953.

November 6: UN General Assembly Resolution 614.

November 9: Dr. Chaim Weizmann, first president of the State of Israel, dies.

November 18 : After the death of Dr. Chaim Weizmann, Albert Einstein declines an offer from Prime Minister David Ben Gurion to become a candidate for the presidency of Israel.

December 1: Abba Eban, Israeli ambassador to the UN, proposes direct negotiations with the Arabs.

December 7: Mordechai Makleff replaces Yigael Yadin as chief of staff who returns to his "first love" - archaeology.

December 10 : Yitzhak Ben-Zvi is elected second president of Israel by the Knesset.

December 19: Prime Minister David Ben Gurion submits his resignation to the President. Two days later, President Ben-Zvi assigns him the task of forming a new government, which is presented on the 22. On 23 December the new government (including General Zionists) is approved by the Knesset.

Lea Goldberg (1911-1970), Hebrew poet and critic, organizes the department of comparative literature at the Hebrew University.

Throughout the year the Czech Communist Party and press wage a campaign of denunciation of Jews as "cosmopolitans", "Zionists" and people who are prone to become traitors in the service of capitalism.

Helen Suzman is elected to the South African Parliament. She is an opponent of the apartheid system.

January 26: "Black Saturday" in Cairo. Mass demonstrations against the British develop into full-scale riots. Almost all Jewish shops and stores and the Jewish school in the Abbasia district are destroyed.

February: Romania deports about 100,000 families, mostly Jews from urban centers to detention camps ad other areas in the interior of the country.

July: Ana Pauker, Romanian minister of foreign affairs and a Jew, is removed from her office. Her allies in state and party positions are purged.

August: Leaders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, including famous Yiddish writers Peretz Markish, Itzik Fefer, and David Bergelson, are executed after a secret trial by the Soviet authorities. They are accused of conspiring to separate the Crimea from the Soviet Union and convert it into a Jewish bourgeois republic that would serve as a base for the Soviet Union's enemies.

November: Rudolf Slansky, former secretary-general of the Czech Communist party, is tried in Prague as a Zionist conspirator and a follower of Tito. Thirteen Czech Communist leaders, most of them Jewish, are tried with Slansky. All confess. Slansky and ten others are hanged and two are given life imprisonment. Two Israelis, Shimon Ornstein and Mordechai Oren (a Mapam leader who disappears in February in Czechoslovakia en route from Germany to Israel) are arrested in 1952 and used as prosecution witnesses.

"Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl", appears in English translation. The diary describes the life and thoughts of 1929 born Anne from 1942 to 1944, when she and her family are hidden from the Nazis in Amsterdam. The diary was first published in 1947 under the title "Het Achterhuis" (The Annex).

Selman Abraham Waksman (1888-1973), U. S. microbiologist, is awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his investigations of antibiotics, especially streptomycin. He coins the term "antibiotic."

Felix Bloch (1905-1983), U. S. physicist, as awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work in measuring nuclear magnetic fields.

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974), French composer, writes the biblical opera "David" to celebrate the 3000th anniversary of Jerusalem as the capital of David's kingdom.