Spear-headed by Purdue University B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation student leaders, this college town became one of the first in the nation this week to rally as a community on behalf of human rights in the Soviet Union. A committee on human rights, aimed at educating the public on the plight of minorities in the USSR and prodding Soviet authorities to adhere to the Helsinki Accords, was formed by residents of the Greater Lafayette area.
The committee, described as an off-shoot of the Hillel Foundation’s Soviet Jewry Committee, was inaugurated by a four-day human rights program in which the mayors of Lafayette and West Lafayette participated and clergymen of all faiths devoted sermons to the cause of minorities in the Soviet Union.
Two petitions were presented to Rep. Floyd Fithin (D.Ind.) who, with Indiana’s Democratic Senator Birch Bayh, will submit them to the Soviet Ambassador in Washington. Anatoly F. Dobrynin with the request that they be conveyed to Soviet Communist Party Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev.
The petitions contained more than 3500 signatures. One asks that Prof. Naum Salansky, an imprisoned Soviet Jewish activist, be released and allowed to join his dying mother in Israel. The other demands the re-unification of Mrs. Irina Astahkova-McClellan with her husband, Prof. Woodford McClellan, who teaches history at the University of Virginia.
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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.
