The House Foreign Affairs Committee’s European subcommittee promised Mrs. Rita Gluzman today that it would ask the State Department to seek the release of her husband from the Soviet Union so that he can join her and their year-and-a-half-old son–whom the father has never seen–in Israel.
Rep. John Buchanan (D., Ala.), speaking for the subcommittee chairman, Rep. Benjamin S. Rosenthal (D.N.Y.), and other members of the unit, made the pledge after the 23-year-old emigre testified on her personal difficulties as a Jew in the Soviet Union and on the problems faced there by Jews wishing to live as Jews. Mrs. Gluzman went to Israel two years ago, but her 23-year-old husband, Yakov, was held back at the last minute and has not been allowed to leave the USSR.
CHARGE TIMES STORY SLANTED
Also today, Richard Maass, chairman of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry, challenged the testimony yesterday of Sol Polansky, a Foreign Service officer. Polansky, who is Jewish, said that the number of Yiddish-speaking Soviet Jews made it not “worthwhile” for the Voice of America to broadcast Yiddish programs to the USSR.
Maass suggested that Soviet statisticians had lopped off from the total number of Soviet Jews those Jews who had decided not to identify Yiddish as their mother tongue any longer. Maass noted that between 1959 and 1970, the official Soviet Jewish population decreased from 2,268,000 to 2,151,000–a drop of 117,000–while the number of Jews who deemed Yiddish their first tongue dropped from 488,000 to 381,000–a drop of 107,000. Published reports have indicated that fear may be the factor leading many Soviet Jews to lower their Jewish profiles.
Maass, Mrs. Gluzman, Rep. Rosenthal and Rep. Edward I. Koch (D.N.Y.) all criticized the New York Times for its front-page story today headed “U.S. Asserts Soviet Jews Are Not Living In Terror.” They challenged what Maass called the Times’ “rather gross misrepresentation” of testimony yesterday by Richard T. Davies, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State For European Affairs. They said the Times report, by Bernard Gwertzman, over-emphasized Davies’ denial of a “state of terror” for Soviet Jews. It was not until the 19th paragraph that the Times noted Davies’ statement that the US would in fact endorse a pending resolution calling for improved conditions for Soviet Jews and freedom of emigration.
STATE DEPARTMENT DENOUNCED
At the hearings yesterday, Rabbi Avraham Weiss of Rockland County, N.Y., board member of the Center for Russian Jewry, charged that the State Department during World War II “ducked chance after chance to save Jews and bears the burden for the death of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Regretfully, the situation has not changed.” He also charged that Davies’ statement told “half truths” and “may have been written because of the forthcoming visit to Moscow by President Nixon.”
Rabbi Weiss declared that “political and economic expediency should not outweigh what is morally and ethically correct.” He also told the hearing that the onerous tactics of the Jewish Defense League could be curbed only if the State Department undertook a genuine move to aid Soviet Jews. The winds could then be taken out of the JDL’s sails. Davies had earlier condemned the JDL for its “sick and mindless fanaticism” which he said “plays into the hands of those in the Soviet Union who oppose any easing of current Soviet policies toward Jews.”
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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.
