Two Jewish high school students from San Francisco protested to a Soviet Embassy official here today against the discriminatory treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union. Andrew Kluger, 16, and David Klonoff, 17, winners of a San Francisco oratorical contest on the plight of Soviet Jewry, met in a spirited 90-minute session with Soviet attache Ikar Zavrazhon at the Soviet Embassy. The youths presented a petition signed by 5,000 Bay Area residents which urged that restrictive measures against Soviet Jews be removed.
The students said that the Soviet official told them that anti-Semitism existed in the Soviet Union “as it does in New York or Washington” but denied that it was fostered by the Government. He asserted that the Soviet Government permitted its Jewish citizens to establish synagogues, Hebrew schools and other religious and cultural institutions but said they could not be aided by Jews from abroad.
Mr. Kluger told the attache that protests in the United States and other Western nations “will not only continue but grow” until the Soviet Union clearly demonstrated that Jews were allowed the same rights as other national groups in the Soviet Union.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
