The Council of Europe, which serves as an unofficial European Parliament of 21 countries, called today during its regular session here on the Soviet Government to accord equal religious, cultural and communal rights to the 3,000,000 Jews in Russia.
The Council said in a resolution that “there is a European responsibility towards the Jewish people.” The resolution was approved unanimously after having been proposed by the Council’s Political Committee. It urged the Soviet Union to “accord to the Jewish community the religious and cultural rights guaranteed to all religious and ethnic groups by articles 123 and 124 of the Constitution of the USSR.”
The 200 members of the Council, representing all the political parties in the 21 member nations, expressly mentioned the need “to permit Jews to open or reopen synagogues, publish and study Hebrew texts, distribute freely religious articles, organize as a religious community and maintain contacts with Jewish communities abroad.”
The resolution also urged the Soviet authorities to permit the re-establishment of Jewish cultural institutions and appealed to them to “preventanti-Semitic propaganda, whether in the form of books or pamphlets, and eliminate all judicial discrimination against Jews concerned in alleged economic crimes.”
The Council’s Political Committee stressed a paragraph in the resolution which calls for reunification of families. Thousands of Jewish families were split up during the Nazi holocaust and many Russian Jews have relatives in other countries.
PARLIAMENTS OF ALL NATIONS URGED TO RAISE THE PROBLEM
The Council decided to bring the resolution to the attention “of all national Parliaments with a view to drawing the attention of governments to the problem of the situation of the Jewish community in the Soviet Union so that they may raise the problem with the Soviet Government.” The decision marked the first time that an influential inter parliamentary body decided to ask its affiliated Parliaments and Governments to take this issue up directly with the Soviet Government.
The Council also made official a document prepared by its rapporteur, which deals in detail on the subject. That document expressed the belief that ‘the present detents between the Soviet Union and the West provides a good opportunity to raise in an objective and dispassionate way, and with purely humanitarian considerations, the question of the situation of the Jewish community in the Soviet Union.”
Several speakers at the session described the problem as “an obstacle in the way of an East-West detente “and urged the various national Parliaments to do their utmost to pave the way forbetter understanding. Finne Moe, the Norwegian delegate, speaking on behalf of his colleagues, said that the resolution, voted on Israel’s 17th independence day, came “at a fitting moment.”
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