Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy declared here yesterday that “over 100 persons were executed in the past year” in the Soviet Union, “most of them Jews,” for alleged “economic crimes.”
The Attorney General made that statement in an address before the tenth anniversary conference of the Fund for the Republic, attended by 1,500 persons. His statement came in the course of a comparison of civil rights in the United States and those of the Soviet Union.
He said that Christians in the Soviet Union also have been harassed and persecuted and that there was a Soviet law “branding as treason any unauthorized departure” from Russia. The Attorney General also cited “the unhappy story” of a Jewish woman in Russia “sentenced to be shot last February for ‘currency manipulation’ after a prior three-year sentence in Siberia for trying to escape to Israel long after seeing her two daughters murdered by the Nazis.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
