Appeal to Thant to Aid Jewry in Soviet Union, Arab Countries, on Human Rights

Two appeals bearing on human rights and the plight of Jewry were addressed today to Secretary General U Thant of the United Nations, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights.

A petition of 250,000 signatures urging Mr, Thant to put the question of the violation of human rights of Soviet Jewry on the current agenda of the General Assembly was presented to Ambassador J. Russell Wiggins, United States representative to the UN. by the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry which asked him to transmit it to Mr. Thant.

In the second appeal, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations asked Mr. Thant in a letter to renew his efforts to send a UN representative to Egypt, Iraq and Syria to protect the remaining Jewish minorities.

Ambassador Wiggins accepted the Soviet Jewry document from Lewis Weinstein, chairman, and Rabbi Israel Miller, past chairman of the Conference. He promised to make sure that the petition reached Mr. Thant. He recalled a statement by Mrs. Jean Picker in the General Assembly’s Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee, in which she voiced U.S. concern over continued anti-Semitic manifestations in the Soviet Union and Poland and protested against interference with the freedom of any religion. The document bears the signatures of persons of all races and faiths. It is reportedly the first group of signatures to be sent to the Secretary-General on the subject of Soviet Jewry. It points out that “Jews are forbidden to publish religious literature and cannot produce devotional articles. Seminaries and training schools for rabbis and religious teachers do not exist. Jews in the Soviet Union are not permitted a central or coordinated structure.”

The petition noted further that Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin had failed to carry out the promise he made in December,1966 that Soviet Jews would be allowed to emigrate to be reunited with their families abroad. “We are only asking for Soviet Jews what has already been guaranteed to all its citizens in the Soviet Constitution and what the Soviet Union reaffirmed on an international level as recently as May, 1968 when it approved the Teheran proclamation on human rights,” Mr. Weinstein said.

Rabbi Herschel Schacter, Presidents Conference chairman, said in his letter on Jews in Arab countries that their Potation had deteriorated since the Six-Day War “with no relief in sight.” He said there has been a new wave of terrorism in Iraq in recent weeks with new arrests and the murder by torture of an Iraqi Jew. (The arrests followed the advent of a new regime on July 17. The latest murder victim was a businessman who died in prison while jailers tried to extract an attempted bribery confession from him.)

“In Egypt where hundreds of Jews still languish in Jail–their families destitute and unprotected– the pattern has changed from an occasional release to a virtual standstill in this last year. In the past several months only a few Jews have been allowed to leave Egypt,” Rabbi Schacter said. “In Iraq, Jews remain subject to imprisonment, harassment and persecution. Denied their civil rights and subject to discriminatory legislation, this pitiful and impoverished remnant of an historical community is the victim of continuing exploitation as new governments–new ministers of the interior–exact renewed extortions. In Syria, a whole community has been imprisoned–herded into a ghetto, tagged ‘Jew,’ deprived of sustenance, recourse to relief or hope of emigration.”