A proclamation by Mayor Abraham Beame, designating Feb. 9 as “Soviet Jewish Prisoner of Conscience Day” in New York City, was read today by Deputy Mayor Judah Gribetz at a luncheon at which City Council members dined on a Soviet Jewish prisoner’s typical lunch of a cup of water, an ounce of sardines and stale bread.
In the proclamation, which is in line with a resolution before the City Council, Mayor Beame called on all New York residents to participate in prayer on that day “to dramatize their personal commitment to the eventual freedom of all persons throughout the world who are denied liberty for whatever reason.” The luncheon was sponsored by the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry.
City Councilman Howard Golden, Brooklyn Democrat, who wore a prisoner’s uniform at the luncheon and who is principal sponsor of the resolution, urged the United States government to act promptly to obtain the release of Soviet Jewish prisoners of conscience and to bring an end to denial of human rights to Soviet Jews.
DETENTE AND MAILED FIST
The proclamation and the resolution declared that “Jews in the Soviet Union are subjected to harassment and imprisonment when they attempt to exercise their basic human and legal rights as guaranteed under the Constitution of the USSR and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was ratified by the Soviet Union. Trials continued to be staged against Soviet Jews who have attempted to live full Jewish lives in the Soviet Union or who have applied to emigrate to Israel and Soviet Jewish ‘prisoners of conscience’ are systematically denied a subsistence diet, adequate medical care, or even those fundamental rights guaranteed to prisoners of war under the Geneva convention.”
Stanley Lowell, Conference chairman, said that while the Soviet Union “extends the hand of detente to the West, it uses the other as a mailed fist to persecute Soviet Jewry and to force its prisoners to live in degradation.” He accused Soviet authorities of a policy designed to discourage Soviet Jews from seeking exit visas.
Lowell said many Soviet Jewish prisoners of conscience were being starved “spiritually as well as physically” in a “calculated campaign to eradicate the Jewish movement in the USSR.” He cited the treatment of Silva Zalmanson, 28, in the third year of a 10-year sentence, who is being forced to work a 10-hour day, though suffering from tuberculosis and losing both sight and hearing.
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