Governor Carey and Mayor Beame Joined today to proclaim Sunday, April 13, as “Solidarity Sunday” in New York in support of Soviet Jewry. Carey and Beame boarded a chartered boat at Battery Park in Manhattan to hold a nautical news conference. The vessel took the public officials to the Statue of Liberty, where they unfurled a 30-foot long banner proclaiming solidarity with Jews in the USSR.
Joining Carey and Beame were Kings County District Attorney Eugene Gold chairman of the Greater New York conference on Soviet Jewry, which will sponsor “Solidarity Sunday,” other conference officials and Jewish community leaders. In their news session, Carey and Beame urged all New Yorkers to take part in “Solidarity Sunday” as an expression of their all-out support of Soviet Jews who want to emigrate from the USSR, and for the Soviet Jewish “prisoners of conscience” in Soviet labor camps.
Carey said that “Solidarity Sunday” will “show the nation and the world that we will not allow the Soviet Union to force us to become silent or to retreat from our commitment to this international principle: ‘That the right to live where one chooses, as he chooses, is basic and undeniable’.” Beame declared, “We have to tell the world that human rights are not internal affairs, that the preservation, advancement or denial of human rights anywhere are international matters which affect all humanity.”
The magnitude of the crisis confronting Soviet Jewry was described by Gold, who cited stopped-up harassment and persecution of Jews in the USSR in recent months, a new wave of trials and a sharp decline in Jewish emigration. “It is therefore imperative to make our determination and our commitment clear to Moscow and to Washington, and, more important, to every Soviet Jew who looks to the United States as the sole hope for freedom,” Gold said.
In addition to “Solidarity Sunday” in New York, there will be simultaneous events in many other communities in the U.S. that will be coordinated by the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, as well as in cities in Europe and Israel.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
