Interfaith Delegation Marches to Soviet Embassy; Official, Three Clerics Confer

An interfaith delegation composed of II Protestant ministers, eight Catholic priests and eight rabbis marched to the Soviet Embassy today to protest the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union. The march was keyed to the opening in Moscow today of the 24th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Ambassador Anatoly F. Dobrynin was in the USSR, however, and the Embassy would not accept a petition, but it did agree to meet with three of the clergymen. Msgr. Ralph Kuehner, urban affairs director of the Catholic Archdiocese; Bishop Stephen Spottswood of the African Methodist Zion Episcopal Church, chairman of the NAACP and Rabbi Sanford Jarashow of Temple Sholem, Silver Spring, Md., representing the Washington Board of Rabbis and the Soviet Jewry Committee of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington, conferred for more than an hour with Embassy political counselor Igor Bubnov and press officer Alexander Yefstafyev. The other 24 members of the delegation, prevented by the police from massing within 500 feet of the Embassy, circled the block for the duration of the meeting. Msgr. Kuehner said he was asked why he was demonstrating on behalf of Jews, and that he replied: “Because I respect the basic rights of people.”