David M. Blumberg, international president of B’nai B’rith, said that the recent deterioration in the situation of Soviet Jewry coincided with the visit of President Nixon to China. The President’s trip to Peking, according to Blumberg, “may be a factor in the Kremlin’s reduction of the number of exit visas issued to Soviet Jews and the intensified harassment and arrests.”
Soviet authorities, he noted, “may be signaling that the new Chinese-American relationship might jeopardize Soviet Jewish emigration as well as the position of the Jews remaining in the USSR.” Currently on a trip to Israel and Europe, Blumberg made the statement in a report to B’nai B’rith headquarters here. The statement also said “the Soviet Union has embarked on a new wave of arrests and harassment of Jews while sharply reducing the number permitted to emigrate.” The rate of Jewish emigration dropped from 3,000 in Jan. to 1,800 in Feb., Blumberg said.
He pointed to the arrests of a number of Jews seeking to emigrate from the Soviet Union and the denunciation by Soviet authorities of Vladimir Slepak, a Moscow scientist who lost his job because he applied for an exit visa to Israel. Slepak was charged with being a “social parasite,” and threatened with imprisonment. “I believe that world public opinion should respond to these Soviet actions, which so starkly contradict the humanitarian pretensions of the Soviet Union,” Blumberg said.
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