Organizers of the Second World Conference on Soviet Jewry, scheduled to open here Feb. 17, charged today that a Moscow press conference last Friday featuring seven Jewish emigres who had returned from Israel was a “transparent propaganda device that will deceive neither the Jews of the USSR nor the millions of Christians around the world who support the Soviet Jewish struggle.”
The elaborate news conference in Moscow, the first of its kind involving Soviet Jews, was organized by the Soviet Foreign Ministry and Novosti, a feature press agency. Held just 11 days before the Brussels assembly on Soviet Jewry was scheduled to begin, the Moscow conference was seen by many in the West as a ploy to counter the Brussels assembly. Some of the Jews speaking at the Moscow conference read from prepared statements and said that Israel is a racist state. Vsevolod N. Sofinsky, chief of the Foreign Ministry’s press department who conducted the conference, asserted that 90 percent of Soviet Jews abroad wanted to return to the Soviet Union.
David Susskind, chairman of the Brussels secretariat, said that of more than 100,000 Soviet Jews who had emigrated to Israel since 1970 only 45 had returned to the USSR. He quoted a report on the situation of Soviet Jews adopted by the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe Jan. 29, which said:
“Considering the fact that most of the 45 have been since their return, used by the Soviet government in its campaign against emigration and that, moreover, some of them had spent only a few weeks in Israel, it might be supposed that these people were, from the outset, immigrants ‘with a mission.'”
REAL PROBLEM NOTED
Susskind commented: “The problem does not lie in the unwillingness of the Jews to emigrate but rather in the Kremlin’s refusal to let Jews out and in its harassment and intimidation of Jews who apply to leave.” He said that Soviet authorities had cut back sharply in the number of exit visas granted to Jews–from 35,000 in 1973 to 20,000 in 1974 to 12,000 in 1975.
Currently, Susskind noted, there was a backlog inside the USSR of about 160,000 Jews who had begun the emigration process by requesting family reunification affidavits from relatives in Israel. “Soviet Jews who apply to emigrate face public vilification, dismissal from their jobs, expulsion from universities, enforced military conscription, arrest, trial and imprisonment.” Susskind said.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
