The American Jewish Congress declared today that it was “shocked and outraged by the attempt of the State Department to diminish the severity of the situation facing Soviet Jews” in Department testimony yesterday before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee. In a joint statement, Theodore Bikel, co-chairman of the Congress’ National Governing Council, and Eleazar Lipsky, chairman of the organization’s Commission on International Affairs, stated that “at this late date, when we have had testimony to the contrary by hundreds of recent Soviet Jewish emigres, it ill behooves the US State Department to paper over the cruelty of the Soviet regime, or to tell us from these shores who is terrorized and who is not,”
The AJCongress spokesman added that attempts by the Department to characterize the condition of Soviet Jewry as relatively secure “are absurd in the light of arrests, trials, convictions and sentences in Leningrad, Riga and Kishinev this year.” They said the “near-absence of Jewish religious and cultural institutions and facilities” in the Soviet Union is “dramatic testimony to the oppression of Jewish life” there.
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