Sens. Henry M. Jackson (D.Wash.) and Abraham A.Ribicoff (D.Conn.) have told Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger that they would agree to trade concessions for the Soviet Union only if Moscow agrees to substantially increase the flow of Jewish and other emigrants from the USSR and ends the harassment of those seeking to emigrate.
Those conditions were laid down by the two lawmakers at an unpublicized breakfast meeting with Kissinger last Friday held at the Secretary’s request. According to one source, the Senators mentioned an annual emigration figure of 100,000 as a condition for Senate approval of the tariff relief and trade credits sought for the Soviet Union by the Nixon Administration.
NIXON DISCUSSES SOVIET JEWRY
President Nixon addressed himself unexpectedly to the issue of Soviet Jewish emigration during a question-and-answer session with a group of business executives in Chicago last Friday which was televised nationally by ABC. The burden of the President’s remarks on the subject was that his method of quiet diplomacy had yielded results that could not have been achieved by pressure from outside. “I have learned that it’s much better to have your voice heard within the Kremlin than outside.” Nixon told his audience.
He made that remark in replying to a series of questions on U.S.-Soviet detente, none of which mentioned the Jewish issue. But Nixon injected it–for the first time during a nationally televised program according to some sources–when he said: “One of the problems that concerned me has been the fact that many complaints have very properly been made with regard to the treatment of minorities in the Soviet Union and particularly those of the Jewish faith.
“Let me tell you the figures. Before we started talking to the Soviet in our period of negotiation, 400 Soviet Jews a year got out. In the first year of our talks, 17,000 got out; last year 35,000 got out. Now, they still aren’t doing what we would do or what we wound want them to do. but it’s far better to have the voice of the President of the United States heard from with in the Kremlin than on the outside.”
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.
