Canadian Jewish Delegation Asks Government to Act on Soviet Jewry

A delegation of the Canadian Jewish Congress asked the Canadian Government to express “deep and abiding concern” for the rights of the Jews in the Soviet Union and convey this concern to the Soviet authorities “in the name of humanity and justice.”

The delegation, led by Saul Hayes, CJC executive vice-president, called on Paul Martin, Secretary of State for External Affairs, and conveyed to him the “deep anxiety” of Canadian Jewry over “the continued isolation of the Jews in the Soviet Union from Jewish communities in other countries and their inability to maintain a communal existence to which they are entitled within the framework of the Soviet Constitution and Soviet policy toward its nationalities.”

The delegation noted that recently there have been visible signs of “relaxation of the difficulties which the Jewish community has suffered for such a long time” and that these manifestations “strengthen the hope that the Soviet authorities will rectify the situation fully and restore the Jews of the Soviet Union to a position of equality with other religious and ethnic groups.”

Mr. Martin told the delegation that “it should be clear to all the world, including the Soviet Union, that we deplore and condemn discrimination in any country, in any form, on grounds of race or creed or color or nationality. The cause of human rights and human freedom is and must be indivisible. Let us not limit our concern just to anti-Semitism in the USSR, important and vital as that concern must be. Let us condemn vigorously all signs of discrimination, of failure to permit fundamental human freedoms, and of retrograde laws which grind down the individual anywhere in the world.”

In addition to Mr. Hayes, the CJC delegation included Prof. Perry Meyer, Rabbi S.M. Zambrowsky, Dr. Samuel Lewin, all of Montreal; Harry Wolfson of Toronto; and Hy Bessin, Mervin Mirsky and Hy Soloway of Ottawa.