Ncsj Report Rebukes USSR for ‘hollow’ Humanitarian Moves

The National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ), in its year end report, rebukes the Soviet Union for “a year of dramatic, but largely disappointing developments” in human rights and Jewish emigration.

In an 18-page wrap-up of Soviet moves and statements on human rights, released Thursday at a press conference in Washington, the NCSJ assails the new policy of what is being called “glasnost,” or openness, in the USSR since Mikhail Gorbachev assumed leadership as merely a tactical shift, more cosmetic than real, and decries the new Soviet “humanitarian campaign” as “hollow”.

The NCSJ reports that Jewish emigration dropped 20 percent from the already low 1985 figure, with only 914 Jews leaving the Soviet Union last year as compared to 1,140 in 1985.

The NCSJ also accuses the USSR of attempting to “close the book” on Jewish emigration by making statements such as that at the Bern follow-up conference on the Helsinki Accords in April, when they said that “they could not permit the sending of Jews to the ‘war danger zone’ of Israel.”

Such statements have been followed, says the NCSJ, by the concrete new emigration regulations which went into effect January 1, which “fixed in law the narrowly defined family” of parents, children and siblings who may invite relatives to join them abroad, “condemning hundreds of thousands of Jews from ever applying for, much less receiving, permission to emigrate.”

The NCSJ report says that “nearly 380,000” have begun the process of applying to emigrate. Of the 380,000, the NCSJ identifies over 11,000 as refuseniks. These cases, states the NCSJ, have been repeatedly raised with Soviet officials, notably by President Reagan at the Reykjavik summit last October.

The NCSJ report, titled “The Illusion of ‘Glasnost’: A Survey on the Status of Soviet Jewry in 1986,” notes that in April, a top Moscow specialist on nationality questions delivered a lecture before a leading Soviet propaganda body in which he “acknowledged that 10 to 15 percent of Soviet Jews currently would seek to emigrate,” a figure which tallies more with Western figures than with official Soviet statements on the number of Jews wishing to emigrate.

This acknowledgement, says the NCSJ, was rendered “hollow” by the actual numbers of Jews permitted to emigrate.

GOOD NEWS AND CYNICAL TWIST OF FATE

The “good news” of the release of “several prominent former POC’s and long-term refuseniks … allowed to emigrate,” was accompanied by “a cynical twist” of the release of Inessa Flerova and her family to go to Israel to give her bone marrow to her leukemia-stricken brother, Michael Shirman, when it appeared to be far too late for the procedure.

The NCSJ report also noted that David Goldfarb, released suddenly in October and brought to the U.S. aboard Armand Hammer’s private jet, was subsequently found to have lung cancer, “tragic proof,” it says, “that he had not received adequate medical attention in the Soviet Union.”

The NCSJ report notes that nearly half the number of Prisoners of Conscience were sentenced to prison or labor camp since Gorbachev took the reins of the Soviet government. Just within the past eight months, the report says, “alarming news continued to reach the West of the physical abuse of several Jewish prisoners, especially Aleksei Magarik, Yuli Edelshtein, Iosif Begun and Vladimir Lifshitz.”

The report also notes the tightening of the vise on religious observances, including the shortage of matzoh at Passover, raids on private homes at Purim, warnings of prominent teachers of Jewish culture and religion, and the denial of basic rights of religious observance as written into the Helsinki Accords.

Gorbachev’s promise at the Geneva summit of November 1985, as well as in other public statements, to resolve “humanitarian cases in the spirit of cooperation, ” writes the NCSJ, remains “mere words.”