The Soviet Embassy here is being flooded with protests from Protestant and Catholic clergymen, rabbis, educators, and civic leaders assailing Soviet discrimination against Jews and pleading for lifting the official Soviet policy of suppression of Jewish culture and religion.
The latest protest was received today from Philadelphia, signed by 42 church leaders of all religions. It was undertaken cooperatively by these leaders, the Philadelphia Board of Rabbis and the American Jewish Committee. The signers included Archbishop John J. Krol, Archbishop of Philadelphia; Bishop Fred Pierce Corson, president of the World Methodist Council, Mayor James H.J. Tate, and other dignitaries.
The signatories asked the embassy to transmit the protests to Soviet Premier Mikita Khrushchev. They charged that while most other faiths are permitted “bare necessities” needed for religious practice, the almost three million Jews of the Soviet Union “are denied minimal rights.” Among the repressive measure against Jews in the Soviet Union listed in the telegram were:
“1. Legally constituted Jewish congregations are isolated from one another. They are forbidden to organize a central body. They are allowed one contact with Jewish religious groups in other countries. Their leaders are singled out for abuse.
“2. Since June 1961, synagogue presidents in six cities have been arbitrarily removed from office; Jewish communal leaders in Leningrad and Moscow have been sentenced to prison for the alleged crime of meeting with foreign visitors to their synagogues.
“3. Scores of synagogues have been closed by the state. The few that remain are served by rabbis who were ordained more than 40 years ago. For more than a generation, Jewish theological seminaries have been banned, except for a lone Yeshiva in Moscow, opened in 1956. Its enrollment, never permitted to exceed 20, was reduced to four in April.
“4. No Jewish Bible has been printed in 40 years. No articles for Jewish ritual can be produced. This year, for the first time in Soviet history, even the sale of unleavened bread, essential to observance of the Passover, was banned. The prayers of Judaism are said in Hebrew, yet the teaching of that language is forbidden.
“5. Although half a million Jews declared Yiddish as their mother tongue in the Soviet census of 1959, their hundreds of schools, their once flourishing theaters have been stamped out. Much smaller ethnic or linguistic groups have schools, theaters, books and newspapers in their own languages.”
The conditions, the telegram said, revive “memories of the anti-Semitic Stalin regime” which, it pointed out, Premier Khrushchev has denounced. The telegram urged the Soviet Union to implement its oft-repeated claim that it is “a champion of human dignity and equality” and “a defender of minority rights” by lifting these repressive measures. It called on the Soviet Government to conform its behavior “to its own professed principles,” and to the standards of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
