The AFL-CIO convention demanded yesterday in a resolution “that the Soviet regime cease its persecution and discrimination against the Jewish people in the USSR.”
The delegates also strongly urged the United States Senate, in this connection, “to ratify the United Nations Genocide Convention which was unanimously adopted by the UN 15 years ago and which has since been ratified by 64 countries.”
“We demand an immediate end to the Soviet Communist policy of singling out the Jewish people for special punitive treatment in the trials of Soviet citizens for alleged economic crimes,” the resolution stated. “We demand that the Jewish people be accorded the same conditions and facilities that prevail for other peoples in Soviet Russia with respect to the use of their own language, the practicing of their religion and national culture.”
The resolution cited “the traditional humanitarian policy of our country, as demonstrated by President William Howard Taft’s cancellation of the United States trade treaty with Czarist Russia in protest against its persecution of the Jews,” and urged the United States Government “to bring all necessary diplomatic pressure on the Soviet Union and to consider the application of economic sanctions against the USSR to hasten the end of its anti-Semitic policies and practices.”
The resolution also contained an appeal to “our friends and brothers throughout the international labor and democratic movements to join us in raising their voices against Soviet anti-Semitism.”
The delegates asserted that “thousands of Russian Jews have suffered the severest penal sentences including in many instances to death penalty for ‘offenses’ that nowhere in the civilized world would even be considered crimes. Criminal offenses are being fabricated to carry out campaigns for absolving the ruling Communist party clique of blame for their own mistaken policies.”
“Soviet newspapers and broadcasts issue reports designed to whip up anti-Jewish hysteria,” the resolution stressed. “The Jewish names of the accused are emphasized. At times they are accused of having committed their so-called crimes in the local synagogue. Their family ties in Israel and elsewhere are pointed up. The persecution of Jews is employed to foster the Soviet policy of intensifying hostility against Jews in the Arab world with a view of preventing Arab-Israeli peace.”
All this, the delegates declared, was in addition to a systematic Soviet policy of suppressing Jewish religious and cultural practices, including a ban on teaching in Yiddish and Hebrew, Jewish culture, “which was brutally suppressed under Stalin, is being stifled under Khrushchev.”
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