Secretary of Commerce Maurice H. Stans acceded to Jewish Defense League demands today and met for 10 minutes with 10 JDL’ers protesting trade with the Soviet Union. Stans interrupted a staff meeting to see the demonstrators, who entered his offices in anger over what they called the Commerce Department’s compliance with a $1.6 billion industrial deal with the USSR by the National Machine Tool Builders’ Association. They charged the Department with maintaining friendly relations with a country “openly engaged in genocide” of Soviet Jewry. Department spokesman Harry Weiss said Stans expressed “great personal sympathy” with the JDL’s argument but told them the Department did not act unilaterally on such matters and could not be held responsible for U.S. trade policy. The Builders’ Association deal, Weiss added, was a private arrangement initiated by the association. He said the $1.6 billion figure cited by the JDL was inaccurate, but would not elaborate. JDL spokesman Rafael Perl, a law student at Georgetown University and a leader of the Washington Committee for the Release of Captive Soviet Jewry, agreed that Stans was “sympathetic to our cause.”
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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.
