Ford Raps Johnson for Failing to Speak out on Soviet, Polish Anti-semitism

Rep. Gerald R. Ford, Republican House Minority Leader, today leveled a blistering attack on the Johnson Administration for its alleged failure to speak out against anti-Semitism in Soviet Russia and Poland. Rep. Ford challenged the Administration to counter the Soviet’s “manipulation of world opinion” with a sweeping exposure of the “growing anti-Semitism of the Soviet Government.” He suggested that any further East-West trade agreements be predicated on the stand that America cannot do business with foreign governments that practice discrimination. He chided the Administration for permitting the sale of strategic goods to Poland while “a wave of anti-Semitism” sweeps that country “under the guise of anti-Zionism.”

Congressman Ford, who is chairman of the Republican National Convention, delivered his remarks here today at ceremonies dedicating the new Center For Russian Jewry. The Center, according to its vice-president, Jacob Birnbaum, is a privately financed organization with a program to stimulate public opinion on behalf of Soviet Jews.

Rep. Ford charged that the State Department and the White House had given American Jewish leaders “various runarounds” including the explanation that America cannot intervene on behalf of Russian or Polish Jews because “the Communists might raise embarrassing questions about some of our own minority problems.” He said the Kremlin was aware of its vulnerability and for that reason sent Rabbi Yehuda Leib Levin of Moscow and Cantor David Stiskin of Leningrad here “for propaganda purposes to deceive Americans.”

He suggested that the Russians refused exit visas to two other Jewish leaders who were originally supposed to accompany Rabbi Levin because they might have seized the opportunity “to ask sanctuary in a free nation and tell the truth.” Rabbi Levin meanwhile continued his busy schedule meeting with Orthodox rabbinical figures here. He was scheduled to appear in a Long Island synagogue tonight. The Appeal of Conscience Foundation, an interfaith group devoted to seeking religious freedom for Russian Jews, will hold a reception for Rabbi Levin tomorrow. He was invited to tea by Arthur J. Goldberg, former U.S. United Nations representative, at Mr. Goldberg’s Waldorf Hotel suite yesterday. There he met with other rabbis and leading non-Jewish clergymen.

Rabbi Levin met the faculty and students of Yeshiva University today and spoke in Yiddish with its president. Dr. Samuel Belkin. Afterwards the students, many of them rabbinical candidates, lined up for his autograph. He later went to a Sephardic synagogue in Brooklyn and spoke there to 1,500 students, all of Torah Umesorah, the Hebrew day school movement. Next he went to an Orthodox girls’ school next door, being mobbed en route despite a heavy police guard.

The rabbi is “completely worn out,” one source close to him said. “He doesn’t have a free minute.” Telephone calls continue to pour into his hotel suite from synagogues across the country; one Jewish group in Mexico City phoned four times to invite him to a reception, but he has no plans to leave the New York area before returning to Moscow next Monday.

A constant flow of visitors is pouring through his suite. One of his visitors this week was author Herman Wouk. Yesterday a German nun came to talk about peace. In the meantime Cantor Stiskin has been visited and entertained by cantors and an Orthodox cantorial association here.