Israel’s former Premier David Ben-Gurion said today that the “acid test” of Soviet readiness to end discrimination against Russian Jews was whether Russian Jews would be permitted to be Jews in the same way, for example, as residents of Soviet Georgia are permitted to be Georgians.
If such conditions are not permitted by Soviet authorities, he added, at a news conference for the Jewish press, it will mean the extermination of Jewishness. He stressed he had used the term “Jewishness, not Jews. ” He said another key test was whether Russian Jews would be permitted to go to Israel. Soviet officials, he declared, should be willing to allow such departures because there was no Jewish Republic in the Soviet Union; since attempts to create one had failed.
The former Premier said these matters had nothing to do with Israel’s “sincere desire” for good relations between Israel and the Soviet Union, “We want good relations under all circumstances between Israel and the Soviet Union, ” he emphasized;
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