Leon Dulzin, chairman of the Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization Executives, has predicted a drastic reduction toward the end of the year in the number of Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union. His prediction came in a bitter report to the WZO Executive here on the visit he made to the transit facilities in Vienna during Passover.
Dulzin stressed that Soviet authorities were refusing to receive family reunion requests emanating from relatives in Israel in cases where closer relatives were known to have left the USSR ostensibly for Israel but then settled in the United States.
In recent months, he said, the dropout rate had fallen to 55 percent for this reason, and at the same time the overall figure of Soviet Jewish emigration was dropping. The “compromise” proposal suggested by Premier Menachem Begin, whereby American Jewish organizations would offer aid only to those emigrants who have close relatives already in the U.S. was “no longer relevant,” Dulzin said.
The dropouts he had met with in Vienna knew that by going to the U.S. and Canada they were “preventing their families still in the USSR from leaving there,” Dulzin said. He termed their attitude “egocentric cruelty,” and said this pattern of thinking was apparently a product of their growing up in Soviet society. The WZO Executive is to look into a proposal by its treasurer Akiva Levinsky to cut down the time the Soviet Jews spend in Vienna as a way of discouraging dropouts.
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