The circulation of an appeal signed by 239 Soviet Jews as an official United Nations document was criticized Friday by Soviet Ambassador Yakov Malik in a letter to Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. The protest, which asserted that the rights of the signers had been violated by the refusal of Soviet officials to allow them to emigrate to Israel, was circulated in Dec, as a General Assembly document at the request of Yosef Tekoah, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN.
Malik charged, in his complaint, that “pro-Israeli members” of the UN staff had circulated the document, which he called “malicious and slanderous.” He contended that the appeal should not have been circulated because it had “no relation” to the Assembly agenda item, the elimination of racial discrimination, under which it was distributed to all delegations and to the public.
Asking Waldheim to prevent “pro-Zionist, pro-Israeli actions” by. “certain members of the UN Secretariat,” Malik assailed the “servile behavior” of those members and “the opportunity” given Israel “to use the UN for unseemly purposes.” A. UN spokesman said the document was circulated routinely at Tekoah’s request in accordance with a long-standing UN practice under which any delegation has the right to circulate documents relating to any UN agenda item. The appeal was submitted after the UN office in Moscow refused to accept the petition on the grounds that a UN administrative order prevented the officials from accepting petitions from individuals.
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.
