Eugene Gold, chairman of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, said after a meeting today with Secretary of State Cyrus Vance at the State Department, that Vance was “very knowledgeable about the current situation” in the Soviet Union with respect to Jewish emigration and divided families and was “most sympathetic” to these issues.
Gold, who is District Attorney of Brooklyn, met with Vance on the eve of the latter’s departure for Moscow for talks with Soviet officials. He said that the Jewish leaders who attended the meeting expressed their concern to the Secretary over what they described as “deteriorated conditions” in the USSR with respect to its nearly three million Jews.
They referred to the depressed level of Jewish emigration: the large number of divided families among Soviet Jews, most of which have parents, wives or children in Israel; the proliferation of anti-Semitic stories in the mass media; and the series of harassments in recent weeks, including the arrests and detention of several Jewish activists, some of whom are on trial and may receive long prison sentences.
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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.
