President Reagan told a White House seminar on religious rights in the Soviet Union Tuesday afternoon that “the rights of Soviet Jews have taken up much of our official time — and this is very close to my heart.”
With former refusenik Yosef Begun sitting on the dais along with representatives of other religious groups, Reagan said:
“The faith of the peoples of the Soviet Union is pure and unbreakable. As Moses led his people from bondage in Egypt, as the early Christians not only withstood pagan Rome, but converted an empire, we pray that the millennium of Christianity in Kiev will mean freedom for the faithful in Russia, in the Ukraine, the Baltic States, and all the regions of the Soviet Union.
“Today, roughly 90 million people in the Soviet Union, or nearly a third of the population, proclaim some form of belief in God,” Reagan said. He said it was an “encouraging sign” that “some Soviet dissidents have been allowed to emigrate.”
The president spoke three weeks before his summit in Moscow with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, scheduled May 29 to June 3.
What he hopes for ultimately, Reagan said, “is a willingness to see continued change, in the spirit of glasnost, when it comes to matters of religion. Perhaps the process is beginning.”
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.
