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Ask Socialist Congress to Aid Russian Socialist Zionists

July 30, 1931
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An appeal for the organization of a powerful movement of protest against Soviet Russia’s persecution of Zionist Socialist prisoners and to take special action to afford them active help was made today at the Socialist International Congress by the foreign delegation of the Zionist Socialist party of Russia.

The plea points out that a new wave of arrests of Zionist Socialists is now going on throughout Russia. This campaign does not spare even those who have already suffered five or ten years of imprisonment and exile in the farthest corners of Siberia, the Urals and the Solovetzki Islands, it was stated.

The prisons are again overcrowded and cells meant for four are packed with twenty or more prisoners who suffer humiliating physical and moral treatment, the appeal declared. The arrested Zionists resort to such last desperate means as hunger strikes but even twenty day strikes bring no substantial amelioration in their treatment, it was charged.

The Russian Zionist Socialist delegation presented a detailed memorandum citing lists of their members who have been arrested, the places to which they have been exiled and a record of the hunger strikes to which they have resorted. The memorandum contains many first hand descriptions of the sufferings endured by the Zionist exiles and prisoners.

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