5,000 to Join Washington ‘vigil’ Protesting Jewish Bias in USSR

The “Eternal Light Vigil,” a protest demonstration on behalf of Soviet Jewry that will bring over 5,000 persons to Washington next Sunday, is drawing official reaction from the Soviet Union, according to the Vigil’s sponsors.

Rabbi Seymour J. Cohen, of Chicago, chairman of the steering committee of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, a coalition of 24 national Jewish organizations sponsoring the Vigil, said that a “stepped-up Soviet propaganda campaign in recent weeks, depicting the positive aspects of Soviet Jewish life, was a device intended to confuse public opinion and soften the impact of public protest.” He interpreted recent propaganda stories from Soviet news sources as “a definite response to the coming Vigil and similar protest meetings.”

Rabbi Cohen listed among recent Soviet propaganda items the allegations that a memorial to Nazi victims would be erected at Babi Yar in Kiev, a report that Moscow’s Chief Rabbi Yehuda Leib Levin has denied that the Moscow yeshiva had closed, a statement by Premier Alexei Kosygin claiming national attitudes such as anti-Semitism were “manifestations absolutely alien,” and a Pravda editorial admitting existence of anti-Semitism but recalling Lenin’s renunciation of it.

Reference was also made to a Soviet announcement yesterday that three books by Jewish authors will be published in Yiddish. The books would reportedly deal with Jewish participation in the anti-Nazi war effort, the role of the Jews in the anti-Czarist revolt in 1905, and with an anti-Semitic incident in the last days of the Czar, It was pointed out that the same pattern of Soviet propaganda emerged before the April, 1964, Washington mobilization of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, and prior to a recent Madison Square Garden rally in New York protesting denial of full religious and cultural rights to Jews in the USSR.

Arrangements have been made for the presidents of 24 major Jewish organizations to call at the White House, next Monday. Appointments have been arranged by Presidential advisers McGeorge Bundy and Lee White. It is hoped that President Johnson will be able to greet the Jewish delegation and hear its views.

Two special Vigil trains of 2,300 total capacity have been filled. The overflow crowd will arrive from points North, West, and South of Washington by buses, airplanes, and automobiles, More than 100 communities have made known that they will participate.

The Vigil in Washington will be only the first of a series of such comprehensive protests scheduled to be held in a number of Jewish communities around the country. In each case, the local sections of the 24 Jewish organizations making up the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry will participate, along with Protestants and Catholics in those localities.