Ambassador Jacob Doron denounced the governments of Syria and Iraq for their treatment of their Jewish minorities and accused the Soviet Union of applying new restrictions on Russian Jews seeking to emigrate. Doron spoke Friday as an observer at a session of the Economic and Social Council dealing with human rights. Reviewing the problems of the Jewish community of Syria, which he said now totalled about 4500 persons. he stated they had been for many years “the victim of humiliating persecution and oppression in every sphere of life.” including “discriminatory restrictions, arbitrary arrests, tortures and even mysterious murders.”
Doron cited as examples of the condition of Syrian Jews the recent rape and torture murders of four Jewish women in Damascus and the arrest of four men, two of them Jewish, for the crime on false charges. He also reported the arrest of 11 Jewish women in Alleppo who he said were taken to Damascus and tortured to obtain information on relatives who had escaped from Syria.
Doron charged that in Sept. 1972. Iraq plain-clothes police and security forces started picking up Jewish men and women from their homes and from their places of business. During the next seven months, he said, a total of 18 Jews, including three women, were abducted and have not been heard from since.
He cited the machine-gun murders in April, 1973 of five members of the family of Reuven Kashkush, including the father, wife, two sons and a daughter. In their home at midday. Doron said the government of Iraq “must at least show some elementary decency” by providing the next of kin of the abducted 18 Iraqi Jews with “an unequivocal answer” as to their fate, and to provide information on the whereabouts of the bodies of the Kashkush family “and others who have perished.” so they can “at least be brought to proper burial.”
VISAS FOR 1500 SOVIET JEWS REJECTED
Reviewing the problems of Soviet Jews seeking exit visas, Doron said there were currently “at least” some 1500 prominent Soviet Jews whose applications for exit visas for Israel have been continuously rejected and the applicants subjected to repeated harassment. He termed “most distressing” the problem of some 40 Jewish prisoners “whose only offense” was their “ardent desire to return to their ancestral homeland by exercising their basic human right to leave the Soviet Union.”
Doron said that there had been “a substantial decrease in the number of exit permits granted in the months of Jan., Feb. and March of this year” and that some 120,000 applicants were now waiting for their visas. In recent months, he said, there has been a cut in even the “meager number” of exit permits granted to Jews with university degrees or professional skills.
“The latest bureaucratic “invention” is the disappearance from their offices of the regular staff of the ovir,” Doron said. “This compels Jews to wait for weeks and sometimes months, for the chance of merely presenting their requests for emigration visas. For example in Kishinev only one ovir official remained on duty last month, charged with the task of dealing with requests for exit visas of over 1800 families.” Thus, the Israeli diplomat noted, the Soviet authorities “kill two birds with one stone–they deliberately delay the presentation of applications for exit visas, and then claim that “fewer Jews are now applying for immigration.”
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