While President Reagan and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze met for four hours in the White House Friday, some 100 persons gathered across the street in Lafayette Park to stress the need to keep the cause of Soviet Jewry on the agenda of the talks between the United States and the Soviet Union.
“The Soviet government is aware what we do here today, perhaps in a sense, more aware than our own government,” Rep. Michael Barnes (D. Md.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told the rally sponsored by the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington.
Barnes stressed that demonstrations, letters and other signs of support “makes a difference” and said he and others have been told this “by the people whose freedom we seek,” Jews in the USSR.
Sen. Paul Trible (R. Va.), member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the “continuing persecution” of Soviet Jewry “one of the most sustained, systematic and severe acts of repression in history.” He said he has been assured that President Reagan will bring up the issue during his summit conference in Geneva with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
100 SENATORS SEND LETTER TO REAGAN
Only a day earlier a letter was hand delivered to the White House signed by all 100 Senators urging the President to raise the human rights issue with Gorbachev.
The letter was initiated by Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole (R. Kan.) and Minority Leader Robert Byrd (D. W. Va.) and suggested by the National Conference on Soviet Jewry.
At Friday’s rally, Barnes’ point that demonstrations make a difference was illustrated by Rabbi Leonard Cahan of Congregation Har Shalom, who is president of the Washington Board of Rabbis which held a daily freedom fast for Soviet Jewish Prisoners of Conscience across from the Soviet Embassy from the day after Rosh Hashanah through last Thursday.
The rabbis distributed literature and spoke about the situation to members of their congregations and to those participating in the noon vigil across from the Embassy sponsored by the Jewish Community Council for the last 15 years.
Cahan said they held up a small sign and were asked by a member of the Secret Service to put it away because the Soviets had complained. The rabbi said he was told that it was really irritating the Soviets.
CHRISTIAN CLERICS PARTICIPATE IN FAST
On Yom Kippur, Christian clergymen participated in the freedom fast and two of them were arrested. At the rally Friday, the Rev. Clark Lobenstine, executive director of the Interfaith of Metropolitan Washington, said Christians demonstrated as “people of faith to express solidarity with people of faith in the Soviet Union who are being persecuted.”
He said Jews and others are not being allowed “to practice their faith freely in their country nor have they been free to leave to practice their faith elsewhere.”
Ira Bartfield, chairman of the Jewish Community Council’s Soviet Jewry Committee, stressed that peace was the most important issue to be discussed between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But he noted that peace must include the human rights of Soviet Jews.
Another participant in the rally was Daniel Yelenik, 15, a sophomore at the Hebrew Academy of Greater Washington, who described his meetings with Soviet refuseniks two years ago and with their relatives in Israel. He noted that when Soviet Jews emigrate to Israel their suffering does not end because members of their families are not also allowed to leave the USSR. He declared that Sovietrefuseniks “are not guilty of any crimes, they are not enemies of the USSR, they just want to go home.”
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.
