Tells Gop Platform Unit Maass Says 80,000 Russ Jews Have Applied for Exit Visas

Richard Maass, chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, departed yesterday from his prepared text in testimony before a Republican platform subcommittee to denounce the new Soviet increased exit charges to Russian academicians seeking to emigrate, calling the decision “a return to the cruel and inhuman devices which the Soviet government has used in the past.” He told the committee members that the increase in exit fees “applies to emigrants to all countries, not only to Israel.”

Responding to questions, Maass said that more than 80,000 applications from Russian Jews were currently on file with the Soviet visa agency and he called that to 1 “perhaps the tip of the iceberg.” He also said that applications for visas by Jews were now at the rate of 6000 a month, “double what it had been.”

In his prepared statement, he said that in 1956, there were 450 synagogues in the USSR, fewer than 100 by 1963 and that at the present time there are about 60 synagogues “in addition to private prayer meetings.” In his statement, he criticized the Voice of America, operated by the United States Information Agency, which he said was “active in bringing news to Jews in the USSR” but, he added, “the tone of present material and the time allocated is unsatisfactory.”

The Maass statement recommended expansion of VOA programming “to include at least one full hour weekly, with Hebrew and Yiddish components to bring Voice of America practice in line with its policies regarding other minorities” in Russia. The statement also urged that “all forms of communications between United States and Soviet citizens, especially Soviet Jews, including mail not delivered and blocked telephone service, be immediately reinstated.”

M.T. Mehdi of New York, secretary general of the Action Committee on American-Arab relations, told a platform subcommittee that President Nixon should invite Egyptian President Sadat and Palestinian Arab guerrilla leader Yassir Arafat to the White House for a meeting “to develop better ties with the Arab people.” That proposal was not in Mehdi’s prepared statement which said that the Arabs “are an independent people who refuse being occupied by Zionist Jews or British or French colonialism or Soviet influence.”