New charges that the Soviet Union is waging an organized campaign of discrimination against the 3,000,000 Jews within its own borders were voiced here today at the closing session of the three-day meeting of the American Jewish Committee’s national executive committee. The charges were contained in a report, released by vice-president Alan M. Strook, based on hundreds of interviews at European ports of embarkation with refugees from Eastern Europe.
The report insisted that the Khrushchev regime-directed campaign against Jewish cultural and religious life had failed. “Soviet Jews, particularly the youth, display today stronger indications of indentification as Jews than ever before,” the report said.
Meanwhile, AJC president Irving M. Engel warned of the “grim and real danger that a major portion of the Middle East may come under Soviet control. He asserted that the differences and tensions between Israel and the Arab states form only a small segment of the foreboding pattern emerging in that troubled region.
Earlier, Mr. Strook reported on conditions in Morocco and Tunisia which he had visited during a recent Committee mission there. He said that both President Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia and Premier Embarek Bekkai of Morocco declared that their administrations’ policies toward the Jewish population will be guided by the principle of equal rights.” However, Mr. Strook stressed, Jewish communal leaders in Morocco are disturbed by that country’s outright ban on or limitation of emigration; leaders in both countries were concerned with the non recognition of Jewish community structure.
A two-year study by the AJC, released this week-end, said extremists and racist agitators operating in Northern states constitute “the principal sources” of inflammatory, anti-Semitic literature currently flooding the South. In its memorandum, the Committee warned that in recent months the anti-Semitic provocation has been stepped up apace with the emergence of such trouble spots as Nashville, Tennessee and Little Rock.” The Committee charged that one of the motivations of Northern racists distributing anti-Semitic literature in the South is a desire for financial gain.
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