Angry Reaction to Iraqi Executions Continue to Echo; Release of Jews Demanded

Angry reaction to the Iraqi hangings continued to reverberate today. Memorial services for the nine Jews executed last week as alleged spies for Israel were held in several cities around the country. Prominent public figures spoke out in condemnation of the “show trials” and public executions. Demands were made in several quarters for pressure on the Baghdad regime to permit the remaining Jews in Iraq to emigrate.

In New York today, the Human Rights Committee of the United Nations Association of the U.S.A., a private, non-official organization supporting the UN, called on Secretary General U Thant “to dispatch immediately a special representative to Iraq, who will observe any new trials and will inquire into the nature and circumstances of the previous trial and executions.” The appeal to Mr. Thant contained in a statement presented at an emergency meeting of representatives of more than 400 nongovernmental organizations accredited to the UN convened by the Human Rights Committee of the UN Association. The statement demanded that, in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “the remaining members of Iraq’s Jewish community, who now live in fear and trembling for their lives and future, be given the opportunity to leave, and to re-establish themselves in friendlier environments.”

The Negro mayors of two Middle West cities publicly deplored the Iraqi hangings. Mayor Carl B. Stokes, of Cleveland, expressed the hope “that our entire community will declare its outrage and will offer to assist the Jewish population of Iraq in every way possible. This is a time to speak out without subtlety or ambiguity.”

Mayor Richard G. Hatcher, of Gary, Indiana, wrote in his weekly column in the Gary Post-Tribune: “That a pogrom mentality should be allowed to develop in this age anywhere in the world, just one generation from the searing experience of Auschwitz, is intolerable.”

In New York some 1,000 workers, including Negroes and Puerto Ricans, picketed the Iraq Mission to the UN and presented a statement condemning “the obscene spectacle of the festive behavior of 200,000 Iraqis” who witnessed the executions. The picketing was sponsored by the American Trade Union Council for Histadrut and its New York branch.

In Boston today, Richard Cardinal Cushing denounced the hangings in a statement prepared for a prayer vigil held on Boston Common under the auspices of the Boston Jewish Community Council. “From whatever point of view this action is judged, its character must be recognized as both brutal and inhuman…It cannot fail to make all men anxious about the future of the small Jewish community in Iraq, a remnant already beset with weighty problems and threatening dangers,” Cardinal Cushing said.

In New York, Samuel Bronfman, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress and chairman of its North American section, urged the mobilization of the “collective moral pressure” of the world to permit the emigration of Iraq’s remaining Jews. He said that approximately 1,000 Jews remained in Egypt and about 4,000 were still in Syria “also unwanted, also harassed and humiliated and also prevented from leaving.”

An Iraqi living in London charged today that the Baghdad trials which led to the public executions of 14 Iraqis, nine of them Jews, for allegedly spying for Israel, were conducted by a court guilty of irregularities. He said the military tribunal pre-supposed the guilt of the accused, shouted down their protestations of innocence and intimidated them into making confessions. Hamid Amir-Dagh, in a letter published in the Guardian, said he based his impressions of the trials on official reports broadcast by Radio Baghdad and accounts in Iraqi newspapers.