Call Issued for Nation-wide ‘committees for the Release of the 32’ Soviet Jews

Twenty-three hundred persons cheered Rabbis Herschel Schacter and Steven Riskin in the Hunter College Assembly Hall last night as they urged the creation across the country of “Committees for the Release of the 32,” a reference to the number of Soviet Jews arrested in recent months. Rabbi Schacter, chairman of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, and Rabbi Riskin, chairman of Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, also called for an International Release Committee composed of lawyers. The auditorium was filled to capacity, and hundreds were turned away. Theodore Bikel, the actor, folk-singer and American Jewish Congress official, called for solidarity with Soviet Jews and condemned those whose extreme actions might endanger the cause. The entertainers included Shlomo Carlebach, the “singing rabbi”; Jo Amar, an Israeli singer; and the Choreographic Workshop in Jewish Dance. The evening’s program included the word-by-word re-enactment of the trial of Boris Kochubiyevsky, a courageous Russian Jew tried last year in the same Kiev courthouse as Mendel Beilis and the singing of the Moscow Jewish resistance song. “To the Pharaoh.”