Concern for the position of the Jews in the Soviet Union has been expressed by a number of faculty members in various Canadian universities in a joint petition to the Soviet Ambassador to Canada, it was reported here today by Dean Maxwell Cohen of the McGill University law faculty.
Dr. Cohen said the petition also included a request to the envoy to inform his Government of the views of the scholars in the hope that steps would be taken to remedy the situation. Dean Cohen sent a covering letter asserting that the signers of the petition were “deeply disturbed to learn from generally well-documented evidence that the Jews of the USSR are not accorded the same freedom or status as other religious, ethnic and national groups” in Russia.
The petition said that the signers, “in seeking for Russian Jewry the same freedom as other national and religious minorities of the USSR enjoy,” were not motivated “by opposition to the USSR or its political and social system.” What concerned them, the petition said, was “the mounting evidence of inequalities and restrictions” which prevent Russian Jews “from freely preserving their group identity and maintaining their religious, communal and cultural life and institutions and which debar them both from establishing nationwide communal institutions and from association with their fellow Jews in other lands in pursuit of matters of common Jewish concern.”
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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.
