Forty-five Moscow refuseniks, protesting Soviet violations of human rights, sent a letter to an international human rights conference in Bern, Switzerland, appealing to the participants "to help us in realizing our legitimate right to leave the USSR, the right that has been guaranteed in particular by the Helsinki Accords."
The refuseniks, all of whom have been waiting for years to go to Israel, warned that "if no solution of such a simple problem as Jewish emigration from the USSR is soon found, the other issues of the Helsinki Accords more difficult to resolve and control may be in danger of being indefinitely shelved."
The conference in Bern, which opened Tuesday, includes experts from 35 countries which signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975. The six-week meeting will deal with issues of human contacts, including telecommunications, tourism, and family reunifications.
According to the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, the signers of the letter included Inna Begun, Alexander Lerner, Mikhail Kholmiansky, Lev Ovsishcher, Sergei Ruzer, Leonid Ozernov, and Alexander, Rosa and Olga Ioffe.
The National Conference also said it had learned that Jewish activists inside the Soviet Union have asked that the subject of Jewish emigration from the USSR be given "top priority" by Western Jewish communities. They point out that only 47 Jews were allowed to leave the Soviet Union last month.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
