Clerk Union Assails ‘farcical Trials’ Against Russian Jews

The 650,000-member Retail Clerks International Association is sending President Nixon its expression of support for Soviet Jewry, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency was informed today by Walter Davis, executive assistant to union president James T. House-wright. The support is contained in a resolution recommended by the union’s executive board and unanimously adopted by the 1100 delegates from the United States and Canada at their 26th convention in Honolulu, Davis said.

The resolution demands that the Soviet Union cease the “farcical trials now being conducted by the USSR against its Jewish citizens” and urges the US to press the USSR “to grant its Jewish citizens their right to freedom of opinion and their right to emigrate.” It charges that “show trials” of a “large number” of Jews were “surrounded by a cloak of secrecy, with a ban on foreign press coverage and suppression of precise charges against the defendants.”

In what Davis called a “direct comparison with previous anti-Semitic activity in world history.” the resolution points out that the Soviets’ “virulent campaign of anti-Semitism” is “in essence a continuation, under new conditions, of historic anti-Semitism and more recent Nazi anti-Semitism, whose outrages against humanity shocked the civilized world.” The statement said “this campaign of oppression, persecution and imprisonment is clearly in violation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, duly and officially ratified by 46 nations, including the USSR and the Ukraine.”

“We urge our government,” the union’s resolution concludes, “that through all agencies available to it and through the United Nations it bring every available form of pressure to bear against Soviet anti-Semitism until the government of the USSR is compelled to grant its Jewish citizens their right to freedom of opinion and their right to emigrate.”